Watching Pages, Reading Pictures : Cinema and Modern Literature in Italy [1 ed.] 9781443803021, 9781847189172

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Watching Pages, Reading Pictures

Watching Pages, Reading Pictures: Cinema and Modern Literature in Italy

Edited by

Daniela De Pau and Georgina Torello

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Watching Pages, Reading Pictures: Cinema and Modern Literature in Italy, Edited by Daniela De Pau and Georgina Torello This book first published 2008 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2008 by Daniela De Pau and Georgina Torello and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-917-2, ISBN (13): 9781847189172

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Daniela De Pau and Georgina Torello SECTION 1: THEORETICAL ESSAYS Chapter One............................................................................................... 30 Translation, Adaptation, Transposition: A Semiotic Challenge Nicola Dusi Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 39 Literature and Cinema: Adaptation, Translation, Transmutation, Citation Antonio Costa Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 57 From Literature to Film: Typologies of Transfer Raffaele Cavalluzzi Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 75 Vadetecum: A Manifesto of Inter-Media Re-creation Carlo Testa SECTION 2: FIDELITY Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 96 Tarchetti's Fosca e Scola's Passione d’amore: A Comparison Marco Arnaudo Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 117 Archibugi, A “Writer” on the Set Daniela De Pau

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Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 131 Cristina Comencini, Novelist and Filmmaker: From La bestia nel cuore to Don’t Tell Flavia Laviosa Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 150 Of Body and Soul: From Pirandello to the Taviani Brothers. Literature, Theatre, Cinema Manuela Gieri Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 167 Francesco Rosi’s La tregua: A Time Odyssey Gaetana Marrone SECTION 3: BETRAYAL Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 184 Engendering Fidelity: The Film Adaptation of Pavese’s Tra donne sole Valerie A. Mirshak Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 198 Look Who’s Talking: Nessuno torna indietro, From Alba de Céspedes to Alessandro Blasetti Gloria Monti Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 218 To untie the tangle: Pietro Germi and That Awful Mess on Via Merulana Stefania Benini Chapter Thirteen...................................................................................... 242 Dog Bites Dog: The Method of Disrespect in Ferreri’s Adaptation of Flaiano Riccardo Boglione Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 262 Visconti’s melancholies between Marcel Proust and Mario Praz: Conversation Piece Simone Dubrovic

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Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 279 “A writer cannot believe two stories at once”: Modes of adaptation in La lunga notte del ’43 (Florestano Vancini, 1960) Federica Villa SECTION 4: STRATEGIES OF TRANSLATION Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 294 Beyond the Figurative: The Desert of the Tartars between Literature and Film Nicola Dusi Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 312 Fascism from Stage to Screen: Film Adaptations of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and Paola Riccora’s Sarà stato Giovannino Jacqueline Reich Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 324 How to Deal with Female Penetration and not Die in the Attempt Georgina Torello Chapter Nineteen ..................................................................................... 340 With Eyes Wide Shut: From Pricò to I bambini ci guardano Piero Garofalo Chapter Twenty ....................................................................................... 361 Declares Pereira: A Witness in Search of an Identity Elena Benelli SECTION 5: BLURRED BOUNDARIES Chapter Twenty One................................................................................ 378 The Amphibolic Nature of Pasolini’s Theorem(s) Luca Caminati Chapter Twenty Two ............................................................................... 393 Romanzo criminale: The Novel and the Film through the Prism of Pasolini Millicent Marcus

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Chapter Twenty Three ............................................................................. 406 Improvisation and Novelization in the recasting of Italian Identity in Non ci resta che piangere/Nothing Left to Do But Cry (1985) Carlo Celli Chapter Twenty Four............................................................................... 418 Text-Image, Departure and Return: Io non ho paura Viva Paci Contributors............................................................................................. 434

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many people have offered every kind of assistance in this project, and now that it finally sees the light in the form of a book, it is to each one of them that our most sincere gratitude goes. We wish to thank June and John Stubbs, Marella Feltrin-Morris, Piero Garofalo, Jamie Richards, Sarah Grey, Monica Hanna, Meriel Tulante, Elissa Popoff and Stefania SidoliStewart for their wonderful job as translators, and Vivienne Pettman for her patience in helping us proof-reading the book, together with John Newell and Meriel Tulante. Others who have read the manuscript and gave us priceless pieces of advice are Massimo Alacca, Stefania Benini, Emilio Irigoyen, Massimo Pastorelli, and Macarena Silva. Lastly, we want to thank Marco and Riccardo for their patience and generosity. We apologize in advance to anyone we might have omitted from this list. It goes without saying that none of the above has anything to do with possible mistakes, inaccuracies, etc. and that those, if present, are entirely our responsibility.

INTRODUCTION DANIELA DE PAU AND GEORGINA TORELLO

There are many internationally well-known genres in Italian cinema: the groundbreaking experience of Neo-Realism, Comedy “Italian-Style,” Spaghetti Westerns, and the horror films of the seventies. However, a “genre” that is rather unfamiliar to large audiences is its crucial and enduring affair with literature. In fact, from the very beginning, literature deeply influenced how Italian cinema defined itself and grew.1 This book provides an empirical approach to this complex and fruitful relationship. The aim is to present discussions of meaningful Italian film adaptations from literary material that greatly exemplify the vastness of modes, viewpoints, and attitudes produced by such an alliance throughout the different epochs. Included among the adaptations discussed, are those that have followed trends and critical debates, and, at times, have rendered them more problematic. The book consists of four essays dealing with theoretical issues, and of twenty close-studies, divided into categories, highlighting the major approaches to adaptation. This preface supplies a concise historical account of this practice, and provides the framework for approaching the close-studies. In Italian cinema, the first literary adaptations date back to 1907 and involved the much abbreviated versions of international classics, including a superb series on Shakespeare’s tragedies, which have recently been restored, as well as other wonders. The short duration of these abridged versions, conceived to entertain and at the same time to educate the public, explains why the term for adaptation in Italian was riduzione (reduction), a word that directly and fully pertains to the quantitative, rather than the qualitative characteristics. According to the producers of the epoch, who 1

On the subject of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the relationship between cinema and literature (in Italy) see, for example, the book West and Costa. For an analysis of cinematic influences on literary language see Bonsaver, McLaughlin and Pellegrini 2007.

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Introduction

were trying to interpret the rules of the market, a literary source almost certainly guaranteed the success of a film. This clarifies why the spectrum of cinematic adaptations was relatively large, and did not only include the classics: it also drew material from the “best-sellers” of the time. Since the first decade of cinematic production, this unashamed mix of highbrow and lowbrow material constituted the cultural legitimization of the new industry and, at the same time, a way of capturing the largest range of tastes and social classes possible. In 1908, the first two film adaptations of Italian novels were released: Alessandro Manzoni’s classic I promessi sposi and Francesco Mastriani’s popular La sepolta viva. As Bragaglia states: Scelte emblematiche, che sembrano preludere a quello che diverrà lo stabile rapporto tra cinema e letteratura: da un lato si cerca ‘autenticazione’ nei classici (sia pure quelli che si trovano in ogni piccola biblioteca), dall’altro ci si rivolge al romanzo d’appendice, tentando così di soddisfare (per riprendere l’immagine dannunziana) sia la dama che la plebea (Bragaglia 1993, 9).2 Emblematic choices that seem to presage what will become the stable relationship between cinema and literature: on one hand there is the search for “authentication” in the classics (even those that are found in small libraries), on the other hand an interest in appendix novels, trying to satisfy (to recall D’Annunzio’s image) both the lady and the plebeian/working girl.

Although the theories and analysis of adaptation have dealt, with the question of fidelity (Mitry 1971; Fried 1987; Marcus 1993; Stam 2000) for at least the past thirty years, it has finally been decided to worry less about “faithfulness,” and more about “readings, critiques, interpretations, and rewritings of prior material” (Stam 2000, 76). Since the beginning of Italian cinema, all this concern appears to have centered on a false problem. Firstly, because the fidelity issue, as is the case with any preconception, has to be inscribed into a broader and more complex context of “originality” and “transmission of traditions.” Secondly, because the problem of fidelity, if present at all, has often been of secondary concern for Italian theorists or proto-theorists. Adaptation has been such a significant and common practice since the dawn of cinema, that an urge to speculate about this recently created “genre” soon spread in specialized magazines and other similar publications. Practice, and what one might today call proto-theories, were 2

All translations are ours, unless otherwise noted.

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born together and continued to proliferate alongside each other: their interrelationship, which was often very controversial, is key to understand Italian cinema as a whole, both in its past and present incarnations. At that time, for instance, commentators were especially concerned with the success of the visual effects and the techniques of the new medium, rather than with the actual rendition of the supposed “original” message and/or effects. One of the reasons for this position can be explained by the environment in which this kind of debate appeared. In the early 20th century, the debates and essays about cinematic adaptations were not accepted for publication in the cultural or literary magazines of the day, nor were they included in the daily or weekly popular publications. They were published, almost exclusively, by film magazines, and were primarily dedicated to the analysis of the development of filmic language, rather than comparing it to actual novels or poetry. The presence of literary personalities in the film industry, during those years, oscillated between a few to none, so that any question of the fidelity of the new medium to the old medium was hardly relevant. The readership of such magazines was almost fully composed of non-specialized readers, who were far more attracted by the beauty and charm of the stars of the silver screen than by any other matter, (as is more or less the case today) Se è un dramma o una commedia che si deve produrre, sia su basi storiche o romantiche, deve essere tracciata in precedenza con gli stessi metodi di cui si serve il poeta per scrivere i propri lavori. Solo, l’azione cinematografica essendo più rapida, è necessario che il fatto sia abbreviato, spogliandolo di particolari inutili, ma facendo risaltare invece i momenti salienti della concezione (Micciché 1980, 93).3 If it is a drama or comedy that needs to be produced, on either a historical or romantic basis, it should be outlined beforehand with the same methods used by a poet in writing his own works. But, because the cinematographic action is faster, it is necessary that the fact is abbreviated, depriving it of useless details and instead underlining the relevant moments of its conception.

3

The quote continues: “Abbreviare però non vuol dire quel rincorrersi di personaggi e di gesti, quei cambiamenti repentini di movimenti che stancano la vista, intorbidano la mente, confondono la chiarezza del soggetto, producendo un affastellamento di azioni delle quali nulla resta di poesia, di vita, di arte” [To abbreviate does not mean chasing after characters and gestures, those sudden changes that tire the eye, that trouble the mind, and confuse the clarity of the subject, producing a bundling of actions in which nothing remains of poetry, life or art] (Micciché 1980, 93).

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Introduction

This anonymous article from 1910 is strictly focused on the method of film crafting, and decidedly oriented towards a fast, concise production, therefore omitting any useless details. If this search for essentiality appeared, among other things, to have been initially dictated by the technical constraints of the medium—before 1910 films were on average no longer than 400 or 500 meters—by 1912 however, the new industrial possibilities made it feasible to produce feature films from 1000 to 1500 meters in length, and even film a puntate (i.e. serial films). According to some detractors of the films, this would prevent the “sacrilegious mutilation” of the literary pantheon (Micciché 1980, 156). It is easy to assume, then, that “l’abbreviatio” was not a forced choice, given the primitive technology of the time; it was instead the preferred modus operandi for cinematic creation.4 In any case, the way in which directors and screenwriters understood the shortening of the plot is very complex and based, at times, on individual idiosyncrasies, and therefore not relevant for the current discussion. The early preoccupation with finding an organic language for the new medium, something “faster” than literature, but not as “furious” in terms of the speed of production (as other industrial productions required), continued over subsequent years.5 Dynamism and realistic representation were a prerequisite for the new medium, as Egisto Roggero persuasively asserts in a 1914 issue of La vita Cinematografica: mentre nella letteratura la parola deve dar vita a tutto un mondo ideale, qui—ove la parola tace—è la vita stessa, ch’è movimento continuo […] e, ripeto, continuo, che forma l’ininterrotto romanzo, o dramma, o commedia che noi viviamo ogni giorno e che chiamiamo vita. La vita è dunque un’azione continua: e l’azione è la base unica e vera d’ogni quadro che si proietta sullo schermo (Micciché 1980, 228, emphasis added).

4

For instance, Luciano Zúccoli wrote in 1913: “Nella creazione di soggetti per la cinematografia, si deve tener conto di due caratteristiche di questa nuova arte: la potenza della sintesi e la larghezza e varietà della scena” [In the creation of subjects for the cinema, it is important to consider two characteristics of this new art: the power of the synthesis and the width and variety of the scene] (Micciché 1980, 193). See also Dall’Asta and Bertellini 2000, 300-307. 5 In 1913 La vita cinematografica publishes an article by a.l.p. that opens the discussion about the need for professional writers to participate in the scripts. According to it, directors won’t hire writers because they ignore “numerose conoscenze tecniche” [numerous technical knowledge] a common knowledge among screenwriters (Micciché 1980, 184). See also Micciché 227-231.

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While in literature the word needs to give life to a whole ideal world, here—where the word is silent—it is life itself, that is a continuous movement […] and, I repeat, continuous, that forms the uninterrupted novel, or drama, or comedy that we live every day and that we call life. Life is therefore a continuous action: and the action is the single and only true base of every painting that is projected onto the screen.

In this respect, it is very productive to see how the action/acting duality had been perceived in the American magazine Moving Picture World just two years before: “It looks very much as if Edison and the foreigners were the only ones not bitten by the lightning bug, with the result that his releases are, to my mind, the only ones that are really drama. The others have lots of action, but no acting and no chance for any” (Brewster 1997, 109).6 The two quotes exemplify the gap between Italy’s perception of its own cinema, a combination of action and drama, and the foreign perception of it as a dichotomy between identical terms. By 1916, the discussion shifted towards the necessity of not only finding original screenplays—at last a departure from literature—but also towards separating cinema from other art forms,, especially its closest relative, the theatre. The main principle under discussion, at that time, could be summed up as “avvalersi delle risorse che il cinematografo possiede” [making use of the resources that cinema possesses] (Micciché 1980, 283) to record reality. This was the possibility of a truthful reproduction of “qualsiasi cielo, quasiasi (sic) vastità di orizzonti, varietà di paesaggi, qualsiasi elemento della nature” [any kind of sky, any vastness of horizons, variety of landscapes, any elements of nature] (285); in short, the mechanical possibility of duplicating the world by means of photography in motion. Obviously, the opposite topic, though connected, was cinema’s potential to create “alternative” realities, i.e. “costruendo nella fotografia impressioni e fenomeni che non possiamo suscitare e creare nella nostra vita” [through photography constructing impressions and phenomena that we cannot conceive of and create in our life] (285). It is useful to remember to what extent critics, as well as early directors, perceived the style of cinematic language as an autonomous art that needed not only to be differentiated, but rather to be severed from other forms of artistic creation. Although undeclared but fully understood, what was at stake there was the increasing importance of montage, the ultimate device to alter actuality, something that in following years would become arguably the primary “constituent” of cinema. According to Rosso, the use of “reality” did not mean that a production had to be exclusively interested 6

On the binary action vs. acting style see Gambacorti 2003, 101.

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Introduction

in “‘serie dal vero’: il dramma ci deve essere—più intenso, più ricco di movimento, più rapido che nel teatro—ma il meraviglioso contributo della natura, della realtà multiforme deve penetrarvi come un soffio d’aria libera e pura” [in “episodes from reality” drama needs to be present—more intense, richer in movements, faster than in theatre—but the marvelous contribution of nature, of multiform reality must penetrate like a breath of free and pure air] (285, emphasis added). Several months later, another journalist, Giuseppe Lega, begged for the end of adaptations,7 because “il cinematografo vuole azione non analisi d’anime; movimento non stasi o acrobatismi di passioni e sentimenti…” [cinema wants actions and not analysis of souls, movements nor stillness, nor jiggling of passions and sentiments…] ( 333). Although this last request was never heeded, having added little to the discussion at hand, it still represented a compelling way of conceptualizing adaptation at the time. It should now become evident that the interest in vitality, action and movement in cinema was the focus of the debates, since by then everyone was conscious of the fact that what really distinguished films from books and even from theatre, was its dynamism and the visual turbulence that captivated the spectator. Cinema has since learnt how to capitalize on this difference, and has sought its own language. More important than the question of fidelity in understanding or measuring the relationship between films and books is the struggle between two different languages that both attract and repel each other. Gian Piero Brunetta understands the early relationship between cinema and literature as clearly “parasitical” (Brunetta 1976, 1) and explains: Nella partita di dare e avere che letteratura e cinema hanno aperto fin dall’inizio del Novecento, i debiti del secondo si sono venuti accumulando per lungo tempo senza possibilità alcuna di contropartita. Ciò potrebbe spiegare la mia scelta di dare una vettorialità prevalente al discorso nel senso letteraturaocinema, in quanto, nonostante lo sforzo compiuto dal cinema fin dagli esordi per conquistare una propria autonomia espressiva, la sua storia è anche storia di un rapporto continuo ed interrotto con le strutture letterarie che lo precedono e lo condizionano (1).

7

“Auguriamoci, subito, che l’epidemia attaccaticcia delle riduzioni passi, e passi presto. Soprattutto delle riduzioni del teatro, che è quanto di più banale e illogico e antitetico si possa compiere” [Let us hope that the craziness for adaptations will soon disappear. Especially, those taken from theatre, which is the most illogical, banal and antithetic thing one could do] (Micciché 1980, 332).

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In the game of give and take that literature and cinema initiated at the beginning of the 20th century, the debts of the latter kept piling up for a long time without any chance of a rematch. This could explain my choice of wishing to give a prevalent vectoriality to the literatureocinema discourse, because, in spite of the cinema struggle, since its beginning, to achieve its own expressive autonomy, the story of cinema is also the story of a continuous and interrupted relationship with the literary structures that precede it and condition it.

According to Brunetta, this early ‘parasitical’ relationship changed radically with the advent of sound: “l’avvento della parola, alla fine degli anni venti, sconvolge l’assetto teorico e lo sforzo espressivo di raggiungere una totale autonomia” (Brunetta 1976, 4) (towards the end of the 1920s, the advent of sound, upsets the theoretical system and the expressive effort to reach a total autonomy). As voice appeared on the scene, even more intellectuals answered positively to the call of writing scripts and dialogues for the newly relevant media. Among their ranks were such professional authors as Cecchi, Pirandello, Soldati, Viviani, Zavattini, Alvaro, Marotta, Debenedetti—all with ongoing and stable careers. Therefore, the employment of literary subjects persisted even with the invention of sound. Indeed, the first Italian talkie8 is La canzone dell’amore (1930), directed by Gennaro Righelli and loosely based on the novella In silenzio by Luigi Pirandello. Although considered almost unanimously a dreadful film, La canzone dell’amore is pivotal for many reasons. To begin with, it anticipates, although symbolically, the strong liaison between the “second part” of film history (that of sound cinema) and the world of the novel. Righelli’s extremely loose adaptation of Pirandello underlines the irrelevance of fidelity, in the translation process, between the two art forms. Secondly, according to Brunetta, its huge success was linked to the leit-motiv of the song Solo per te Lucia (Brunetta 1979, 232), thus instantly connecting the new marvel of cinema with catchy songs in the collective unconscious of the audience. This music connection was further developed through the huge interest in the merging of opera and the big screen (Brunetta 1979, 233). Finally, as the ultimate expression of sound, music permitted the desirable, new technical language of cinema to reach full maturity and discarded the vestiges of a sponging relationship with literature, by offering something that literature could not. The film presents

8

The first truly spoken film produced in Italy was Resurrezione, by Alessandro Blasetti, production finished in 1930, but only distributed one year later.

8

Introduction un insolito dinamismo dei movimenti di macchina e sfrutta la profondità di campo visiva e sonora (voce e canzoni off) in modo originale. Tra le scene più significative in questo senso c’è un vero e proprio piano sequenza (da un gruppo di giovani per la strada si passa all’incontro tra i due protagonisti nascosti dietro un albero e poi si ritorna di nuovo ai ragazzi), dove il virtuosismo registico riesce a creare quell’atmosfera liricosentimentale che l’intreccio e i personaggi contribuiscono solo a banalizzare (Mereghetti , 297). an unusual dynamism of the machine’s movements and exploits the depth of field vision and sound (voice and songs off) in an original way. Among the most significant of such scenes, is a true long shot that goes from a group of youths in the street, to the meeting of the two protagonists hidden behind a tree, and then all the way back to the youths again). Here the director’s virtuosity succeeds in creating that lyrical-sentimental atmosphere, which the plot and the characters only trivialize with their contributions.

However, cinema in Italy (as elsewhere) continued to “use” literature, but, from the 1930s on with a different attitude. With the advent of sound, screenwriters gained space and centrality in the industrial process of film because of the prominence of spoken dialogues which, at that point, were far more articulated than their predecessor, the inter-text. Cinema was thus extremely hungry for professional writers who were at ease creating conversation pieces. The 1930s and the first half of the 1940s was the period when the exchange between the two worlds really ignited. Before 1940, four films were based on Pirandello’s novellas; Corrado Alvaro and Vitaliano Brancati actively participated in the writing of screenplays; and Emilio Cecchi, who had started managing the Cines studio in Rome in 1932, began recruiting major literary figures such as Pirandello, Alvaro, and Levi as scriptwriters and advisors, while being involved in many other cinematographic productions. Two other preeminent figures of the Italian literary landscape, Cesare Zavattini and Mario Soldati, stepped into the world of cinema at this moment, and their cinematographic careers will be just as successful and long-lived as their experiences in literature. During the years of Fascism, the trend in adaptations was undoubtedly that of translating novels and plays removed from the social realities of the time: an attitude typical of the fascist ideology and that became ever more acute when the war began, though unwillingly, leaving room for exceptions. Aside from a few classics,9 favorite sources derived from: the literature of 9

Most notable, Carlo Campogalliani’s Il medico per forza (1931), taken from Medicin malgré lui by Molière, starring a brilliant Petrolini; Manon Lescaut by Prevost, made film by Carmine Gallone in 1940; I due Foscari by Byron, directed

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the turn of the of the century, i.e. from the 19th to the 20th century,10 historical themes such as Blasetti’s Ettore Fieramosca (1938) by Massimo D’Azeglio, and contemporary narratives and plays mostly concerned with the sentimental problems of the bourgeoisie11—the public Mussolini was most eager to get consensus from. Together with a couple of national treasures, such as a I promessi sposi by Camerini, and a La locandiera by Chiarini, directors mostly used works from consolatory the classics for middle-class sentiments, notably Edmondo De Amicis,12 some works by Giovanni Verga13 and an abundant use of popular novels, among which

by Enrico Fulchignoni in 1942 (a silent version had already been made in 1923 by Mario Almirante); and Dente per dente (1943) by Marco Elter, based on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. 10 For instance, Luigi Capuana, whose work was adapted by Luigi Mannini and Gustavo Serena in Zaganella e il cavaliere (1932), based on the play Lu cavaleri Pedagna (1909), and by Ferdinando Maria Poggioli in Gelosia (1942), based on the famous novel Il marchese di Roccaverdina (1901); in 1940 Poggioli also brought to the screen Addio giovinezza, a play by Nino Oxilia and Sandro Camasio (1911), in 1942 Morte civile, a play by Paolo Giacometti (1861) which had previously been adapted for the screen three times (by Lo Savio, Del Colle, and Bencivenga, in 1910, 1913, and 1919, respectively) and Aldo Palazzeschi’s Sorelle Materassi (1934); Matilde Serao was adapted by Luigi Charini in Via delle cinque lune (1942) based on the 1889 tale O Giovannino o la morte, and by Gianni Franciolini in Addio, amore! (1943) based on the homonymous novel (1890), and on Castigo (1914). 11 Among others, the plays by Giuseppe Giacosa Come le foglie (1900) and Tristi amori (1887) were turned into films in 1934 and in 1943 by Mario Camerini, and Carmine Gallone, respectively; and the comedies by Alfredo Testoni, Il cardinale Lambertini (1905), Il successo (1911), El noster prossum (1910), were adapted for the screen by Parsifal Bassi in 1934), Mario Bonnard (as L’albero di Adamo) in 1936, and Gherardo Gherardi with the collaboration of Aldo Rossi in 1943, respectively. It is worth noting that both authors had already been used as sources for several silent cinema productions. 12 De Amicis’ works had already been used extensively during the 1910’s and 20’s when four films were based on episodes from his internationally successful Cuore (1886). In 1942, Flavio Calzavara, with the help of Corrado Alvaro on the script, realized a version of a tale taken from La vita militare (1868) titled Carmela (1942). The following year, Calzavara adapted one of the most famous episodes of Cuore, Dagli Appennini alle Ande. A later reduction of Cuore (1948) was made by Duilio Coletti and Vittorio De Sica, who also played the leading role. 13 Amleto Palermi, a director who worked extensively in the silent era, produced in a version of the Cavalleria Rusticana in 1939, by far Verga’s most cinematographed work (four versions were made just between 1910 and 1924). Four years later, Gennaro Righelli directed La storia di una capinera.

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Introduction

Emilio Salgari’s adaptations predominated.14 The general tendency was thus for cinematographers to use literature as a well-stocked pond from which to fish when in search of an instant success. During the post war period, despite the famous anti-literary bias of Neo-Realism that Zavattini emphatically promoted (and which was sustained by critics such as Carlo Bo and Luigi Chiarini), it is both remarkable and indicative of the long-lasting relationship between cinema and literature that, out of what could arguably be considered the triad of neo-realist masterpieces—Paisà, La terra trema and Ladri di biciclette— the latter two were based on novels (Verga’s I Malavoglia and Bartolini’s homonymous book): a reality that reflected the general trend of regarding literature as a warehouse of possible stories. Moreover, neo-realist critics and filmmakers who gravitated around the journal Cinema and whose ideas laid the ground for Ossessione (1943, itself a free adaptation of Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice) by Visconti, made Verga and verism their cultural point of departure, notwithstanding controversy from certain critics who championed cinematic autonomy. Interestingly enough though, La terra trema, which represents Visconti’s highest tribute to Verga, is a film where the literary adaptation is used to mark the independence of cinema. Later on, in his critical re-reading of tradition, Visconti continued to adapt the classics (i.e. Boito’s Senso, Tomasi’s Il Gattopardo, and D’Annunzio L’innocente) in order to express a need for a cinema of ideas based on literature as a privileged source of inspiration. His cinema provided a sophisticated interpretation of reality that would serve as a critical analysis for the creation of a new society. Whereas non-neo-realist cinema had a mostly diminishing effect on its literary sources through didactic and dreary revisions, it is Visconti and De Sica (I bambini ci guardano, La ciociara, L’oro di Napoli)15 who fully succeeded in rejuvenating their sources. Yet, the “soon-to-be” classic narrators of the neo-realist era, Vittorini, Pavese and Calvino, did not have much of a relationship with cinema 14

Once again, it is Palermi who directs the first sound version of a Salgari novel, Il corsaro nero in 1937. After that, a cascade of Salgari’s adaptations follows: La figlia del corsaro verde (1940) and I pirati della Malesia (1941) by Enrico Guazzoni; Le due tigri (1942) by Giorgio Simonelli; I cavalieri del deserto (1942) by Gino Talamo and Osvaldo Valenti, screenplay by Federico Fellini and Vittorio Mussolini; Capitan Tormenta (1942), Capitan Tempesta (1942) and Il leone di Damasco (1942) by Corrado D'Errico; Il figlio del Corsaro Rosso (1943) and Gli ultimi filibustieri (1943) by Marco Elter. 15 The first was adapted from Viola’s Pricò, the second from Moravia and the latter from Giuseppe Marotta.

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although Calvino was a cinephile and a film critic,16 and Vittorini and Pavese were both influenced by cinema in their writings. In fact, it was not until 1955 that the posthumous adaptation of Pavese’s Tra donne sole by the young Antonioni (Le amiche) appeared, and one should wait twenty more years to see a novel by Vittorini turned into film, precisely Garofano rosso (1976) by Luigi Faccini. In the 1950’s, in the middle of what has been called a crisis of narrative structures, a remarkable group of screenwriters (Cecchi D’Amico, Guerra, Age, Scarpelli, etc.) often working together, created, along many original stories, several adaptations that were often convincing and compelling. However, the further one advances into the decade, the more the situation seems to stagnate, regardless of the increase in the employment of classic authors, especially Russians.17 Therefore, on a general level, one could say that the re-newed cinema industry used books as a mere repertoire to create products of innocuous entertainment. As Brunetta effectively describes it: La letteratura, vista e usata nella sua morfologia più ampia, anche in ambito neorealista, funziona così come un immenso giacimento di luoghi comuni, di idee ricevute, di situazioni e sentimenti consacrati e canonizzati. Nelle singole battute, nei gesti, nelle situazioni ripetute di film derivati da soggetti letterari, si ritrovano le regole che cerca di darsi e di rispettare un sistema produttivo che vuole ricostruirsi (Brunetta 1993, 302). Literature, seen and used in its more ample morphology, also in a neorealist environment, functions as an immense deposit of commonplaces, of received ideas, of situations and feelings, which have been consecrated and canonized. In its single lines, in the gestures and in the repeated situations of films derived by literary subjects, one again one encounter the rules of a new productive system that looks to reconstruct itself, to assign itself respect.

It is emblematic that Pasolini’s first film dates from 1960. The work of the Friulan poet—probably the finest and most accomplished example of a 16

Calvino collaborated in cinema productions only once, co-writing with Arpino the screenplay of Monicelli’s Renzo e Luciana, an episode of Boccaccio 70 (1962). A few of his short stories has been used as ideas for films of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, most notably the tale Furto in pasticceria for Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti (1958). The only case of adaptation of one of Calvino’s novels occurred in 1969 when Pino Zac directed Il cavaliere inesistente. 17 Visconti gave his personal reading of Dostoyevsky’s White Nights, in his 1957’s Le notti bianche; Alberto Lattuada’s rendition of Pushkin’s The Blizzard came out in 1958 under the title La tempesta; in 1959, Riccardo Freda adapted the novella Haji Murad by Leo Tolstoj, in a film titled Agi Murad il diavolo bianco.

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Introduction

famous, controversial, intellectual and author who becomes a leading screenplay writer and director18—might be seen as embodying the events of the decade. In fact, his “empirismo eretico” [heretical empiricism] throughout the sixties indicated the way to the abandonment of (conventional) literature in favor of cinema. In 1960, La dolce vita, written by Flaiano and Pinelli, with the help of Pasolini and Rondi, refused to follow the linear structure of the novel, in favor of a subgenre: the diary; thus, given the freedom of expression inherent to the medium, many writers began to approach cinema for inspiration.19 In general, during this time, novels (more rarely plays) were turned into films not just for the purposes of having a recognizable plot or ready-made material, but rather to express the directors’ visions and ideological stands. Among those used in cinematic adaptations, few authors did not belong to the 20th century (in particular Sophocles, Euripides, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Sade as filmed by Pasolini, and Petronio reworked by Fellini).20 Conversely, various works of the names that counted in the Italian literary pantheon of that period were transposed into films: Fenoglio, Moravia, Pratolini, Brancati, Cassola, Bassani, Tomasi di Lampedusa, Sciascia, Bianciardi, Carlo Levi,

18

One should not forget that this era was “occupied” by another screenwriter with a strong, independent literary trajectory, Ennio Flaiano. Numerous other screenplay authors experienced considerable success as narrators (for example Tonino Guerra), and various directors composed both poetry (for instance, Bernardo Bertolucci and Nelo Risi) and narrative (Michelangelo Antonioni and Pasquale Festa Campanile, among others) at least once in their lives. 19 A few collaborations between soon-to-be famous directors and writers should be mentioned. L’Italia non è un paese povero (1960), the troubled documentary directed by Joris Ivens with the assistance of the Taviani brothers was born out of a collaboration between the three and Moravia. Bertolucci debuted as director with a screenplay written by Pasolini, La comare secca (1962). Worth remembering that Bertolucci’s third and fourth film are very free adaptations of Dostoyevsky’s The Double (Partner, 1968) and Borges’ Theme of the Traitor and the Hero (La strategia del ragno, 1970). Goffredo Parise collaborated with Ferreri in L’ape regina (1963). Alberto Arbasino co-wrote the screenplay of Amate sponde (1963) with director Mario Missiroli, adapting his own novel. Between 1967 and 1975, Ermanno Olmi and Corrado Stajano produced various television documentaries about Italy’s latest history; Olmi also co-wrote his Recuperanti (1969) with Mario Rigoni Stern. One of Rosi’s best film, Mani sulla città (1963) generated by the cooperation between the director and Raffaele La Capria, who also wrote the screenplay for another memorable Rosi’s feature, C’era una volta… (1967). 20 Noteworthy are a 1962’s version of Svevo’s Senilità by Carlo Lizzani and Alberto Lattuada’s La Mandragola (1965) by Machiavelli.

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and more.21 Each of these adaptations, though at times born out of the commercial success of the book, somehow reworked the original texts, creating fresh and compelling readings, without fear of great departures from the original stories. Best accomplishment of this trend could be the version of Cortázar’s tale The spider-web given by Antonioni in his masterpiece Blow up (1966). The 1970’s witnessed a great number of adaptations as well. A few were revisions of classics, such as Pasolini’s Decameron (1971); the tv-film Le avventure di Pinocchio directed by Luigi Comencini in 1972; Visconti’s last work, L’innocente (1976) by D’Annunzio and Casanova’s autobiography filmed by Fellini in Il Casanova (1976).22 However, the vast majority were films with a focus on problematic and unresolved matters of recent Italian history. These centered on both past and contemporary—and still “hot”—issues. In fact, not only were these films about the rise of Socialism (as in Bolognini’s Metello, based on Pratolini’s novel) and about Fascism (Bertolucci reading of Moravia’s Il conformista), but there were also films about the 1968 turmoil (Pietrangeli’s Porci con le ali, based on the novel by Radice and Ravera), about terrorism (Cerami’s Un borghese piccolo piccolo adapted by Monicelli), and about political corruption (Elio Petri’s version of Todo modo by Sciascia).23 By the end of the decade, though, the situation had 21

Best examples are Vitaliano Brancati’s Il bell’Antonio transposed in 1960 by Mauro Bolognini (with the screenplay by Pasolini and Brancati himself); Florestano Vancini’s La lunga notte del ’43 by Giorgio Bassani; Visconti’s reading of Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo (1963); Luigi Comencini’s version of La ragazza di Bube (1963) by Carlo Cassola; Francesco Maselli’s rendition of Gli indiferrenti (1964) by Moravia; Valerio Zurlini’s Cronaca familiare (1962) by Vasco Pratolini; Carlo Lizzani’s La vita agra (1964) by Luciano Bianciardi; Giorgio Trentin’s Una questione privata (1966) by Beppe Fenoglio. Special attention deserves the work of director Damiano Damiani, who adapted several Italian novels during the 1960’s: L’isola di Arturo (1962) from Laura Morante’s success, La noia (1963) by Moravia, and Il giorno della civetta (1969) by Leonardo Sciascia. 22 19th century classics are represented by Edmondo De Amicis, source for Luigi Filippo D’Amico’s Amore e ginnastica, and Romano Scavolini’s Cuore, both from 1973, and by Alessandro Manzoni, cinematographed by Nelo Risi in his La colonna infame (1972). Almost no ancient classics were proposed on screen, with the exception of the politicized and free adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone by Liliana Cavani in her I cannibali (1970). 23 Various examples can be found of directors who worked with foreign novels, tales and plays. To name just a few, Visconti shot a very successful version of Morte a Venezia (1971) by Thomas Mann; Carmelo Bene’s brief incursion in the world of cinema, ended with two English classics completely reworked, Wilde’s Salome (1972) and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Un Amleto di meno (1973); in 1976,

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Introduction

radically changed again. Italian film productions became increasingly chaotic. The films of the 1980’s for the most part were either born out of small productions and directed by amateurs/novices with little or no distribution, or they were blockbusters tailored around famous comedians (Nuti, Benigni, Troisi, the Vanzinas’ “crew”, etc.). The use of literature in cinema was, apparently, less important than what it was to previous generations—something that could be ascribed to the cultural formation of the young screenplay writers and directors, who were evidently influenced by both television and cinema as much as they were by books, if not more so. Analogous to this is the so called crisis of the written word, in favor of the image (in all its manifestations, cinema included), which fostered a disaffection on the part of the writers towards adaptations, although several exceptions do exist. It is difficult to pinpoint trends due the scarcity and heterogeneity of adaptations of this time. Old and “new” classics were neglected, for the most part, with the gaudy exceptions of Salvatores’ first feature, Sogno di una notte d'estate, feebly based on Shakespeare, Silvio Soldini’s adaptation of Hemigway’s tale Paesaggio con figure, and Parise’s Il prete bello “translated” by Carlo Mazzacurati in his 1989 homonymous film. What emerges is a strong interest, on the part of the directors, in shooting the novels of their writer peers, or at least in the books published during their formative years. Among the best examples of this are Fratelli by Loredana Dordi, based on the novel by the same title by Carmelo Samonà, and Mery per sempre, Marco Risi’s screen version of Aurelio Grimaldi’s first book. It should be remarked that in these cases, writers participated actively in the creation of the screenplay. This tendency to simultaneousness, and a blurring between the writing and the filming phases continued into the 1990s and, to some extent, still goes on today. In spite of the fact that this last period began with two films that contained very personal (and fuzzy) rewritings of such universal masterpieces as Homer’s Odyssey (Piavoli’s Nostos, il ritorno) and De Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons (Cristina Comencini’s I divertimenti della vita privata), the attention of directors and producers alike has been focused mainly on “recent” best sellers. Indeed, every literary Lattuada adapted Bulgakov’s novel Cuore di cane. Among adaptations of Italian works one should at least remember Profumo di donna (1974), Dino Risi’s cinematographic version of the novel Il buio el miele by Giovanni Arpino; Giuliano Montaldo’s L’Agnese va a Morire (1976) by Renata Viganò; Mario Monicelli’s Caro Michele (1976) from Natalia Ginzburg’s novel; the all-female production of Sofia Scandurra’s only film Io sono mia (1978), based on Dacia Maraini’s Donna in guerra, and the remarkable Rosi’s reading of Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (1979) by Carlo Levi.

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“phenomenon” of the last twenty years, on a cultural or simply profitmaking level, has been transposed into film. Over and above the results that obviously vary from case to case, this tendency bitterly speaks of a cinema that is overly concerned with commercial success: a film is thus produced when the book had already become successful and made a great profit.24 Although a few interesting adaptations of critically successful novels of Italy’s literary past, as well as more recent publications, have found appealing cinematic renditions (for instance, Tozzi’s Con gli occhi chiusi by Francesca Archibugi, Elena Ferrante’s Amore Molesto by Martone, and Pino Cacucci’s Puerto Escondido by Salvatores) and despite the presence of a few directors who consistently work with adaptations of Italian and foreign literary works,25 what seems to be leading the industry is the idea of the successful exploitation of “new” books, rather than that of resuscitating the canon. At the same time, the novel has unquestionably conquered the film industry, whereas plays are only occasionally transposed, and poetry almost never.26 This general trend seems to be confirmed by the great success of two films that came out last year, Antonello Grimaldi’s Caos Calmo, based on a novel by Sandro Veronesi, and the literary phenomenon of Gomorra, the socially engaged novel/essay by Roberto Saviano, adapted for the screen by Matteo 24 An account of the major films produced in this manner would include: Lara Cardella’s Volevo i pantaloni (1988, directed by Maurizio Ponzi in 1990), Susanna Tamaro’s Va’ dove ti porta il cuore (1994, directed by Cristina Comencini in 1996); Aldo Brizzi’s Jack Frusciante è uscito dal gruppo (1994, directed by Enza Negroni in 1996); Alessandro Baricco’s Novecento. Un monologo (1994, directed by Giuseppe Tornatore in 1998 with the title La leggenda del pianista sull’oceano); Niccolò Ammaniti’s Io non ho paura (2001, directed by Gabriele Salvatores’ in 2003), Melissa Panariello’s Cento colpi di spazzola (2003, directed by Luca Guadagnino in 2005 with the title Melissa P.); Margaret Mazzantini’s Non ti muovere (2001, directed by Sergio Castellitto in 2004) and Federico Moccia’s Tre metri sopra il cielo (2004, directed the same year by Luca Lucini). 25 Notably, Roberto Faenza who based six of his fourteen feature films on notorious books by Arthur Schnitzler, Dacia Maraini, Abrahm Yehoshua, Elena Ferrante, Federico De Roberto; Emidio Greco, who directed in the last 34 years only six films, four of which are adaptations of novels and tales by Adolfo Bioy Casares, Karen Blixen and Leonardo Sciascia. 26 Lately, though, there has been an interest in depicting poets’ lives, such as in Tullio Giordana’s Pasolini un delitto italiano and Placido’s Un viaggio chiamato amore, about Dino Campana and Sibilla Aleramo. A playwright, and later film director on his own, whose plays have often been adapted for the cinema is Umberto Marino (for instance, Italia-Germania 4-3, Volevamo essere gli U2 by Andrea Barzini, and La stazione by Sergio Rubini).

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Introduction

Garrone. Symptomatic of this is the fact that when Paolo Giordano’s La solitudine dei numeri primi won the Premio Strega in 2008, the author had already sold the rights to the film version of the novel. As was mentioned above, this book opens with four theoretical essays by Nicola Dusi, Antonio Costa, Raffaele Cavalluzzi, and Carlo Testa, which frame and systematize the relationship(s) between film and literature. Thereon, follow twenty case studies. Dusi approaches the relationship between literature and cinema from a semiotic point of view. He underlines that a text is never isolated but firmly inserted within a context (and thus contaminated by many other writings) and that studying a film taken from a text entails at least two choices: either relate the film to its “departing” universe of meanings (source oriented), or relate it to its “arrival” cultural system (targeted oriented). After a discussion about recent Italian trends of study (Eco’s idea of inter-media translation as a form of interpretation, Fabbri’s intersensitive approach, Calabrese’s concept of transposition, etc.), Dusi remarks that recent semiologists distinguish between a strict and a loose form of equivalence between texts. The latter is the one he is more interested in, because it allows one to consider multiple elements of the same text and conceives the translation, or transposition, as a “global” relation. The analysis of an adaptation as an inter-semiotic translation focuses on the comparison of narrative structures and of enunciative strategies, which enables one to consider the film as an aesthetic text. Precisely by pursuing aesthetics at the level of expression, Dusi claims, a cinematographic transposition constructs internal systems of resonance and signification that are analogous to the lyricism of the literary text. Costa analyzes the dynamics of exchange between literature and cinema across multiple parameters, showing how their interaction (and mutual interferences) were beneficial and multifaceted from the beginning. From an empirical point of view, the distance between the iconic nature of the image and the symbolic nature of the written word is shortened through different means (citations, subtitles, the presence of pages of a book etc, noticeable in the opening credits of recent films), as well as by the importance the various phases of writing have had on the understanding of the finished product. From a theoretical point of view, their distance has often been abridged by thinkers who considered cinema as ideogram writing, and by semiologists who analyzed the specificity of the cinematographic écriture and considered the film as a text. Inversely, 20th century literature testifies to such hybridization, acquiring from cinema both cinematographic themes and “modalities” of montage that are

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mimetic of it. These reciprocal borrowings produced inspirational and economical advantages for over a century and, as Costa suggests, any comparison between the two “sister arts” needs to be developed according to an inter-textual and an inter-medial discourse. Cavalluzzi’s article analyzes four different adaptation typologies that have been utilized over the last sixty years. Remarkably, he places the Italian situation in a dialogue with a broader, international context. In an investigation that goes from the simple “illustration of a text” (for instance in Soldati, and De Sica), to the radical “reinvention of the text” (as is often the case with Antonioni, Ferreri, and Pasolini) via different “reelaborations” (Visconti and Bellocchio), he reveals all these categories by giving solid and convincing examples, while at the same time illustrating an exhaustive corpus of Italian adaptations of the post-war era. Testa’s essay recounts the three stages of the separatism paradigm (Avant-Gardes, Futurists and Formalists, Jean Mitry and his subsequent North American followers) that began crippling the literature-cinema relationship at the end of the 19th century and continues to this day. Before the conventional date of 1895 though, as Testa recalls, imitatio had been a commonly accepted practice of dialogism between past and present, one that, for centuries, has produced fruitful inter-media and intra-media exchanges. Linking fidelity issues with the more recent “separatist” trend, Testa refers to it as a built-in ontological prejudice against any derivative work of art with respect to the original work. He thus advocates the substitution of the word “adaptation” with that of “re-creation,” not intended as “forgery” but rather as the intelligent reproduction of an equivalent function. Such re-creation needs to be thought out and practiced as a system continuously striving for the highest level of complexity. The twenty case-study essays that follow are grouped into four categories, arranged according to a conceptual rather than chronological order. The first category is based on films whose adaptations are explicitly “faithful” in various ways. Marco Arnaudo's essay discusses Ettore Scola's Passione D’amore (1981), an adaptation of Iginio Ugo Tarchetti’s Fosca (1869). In his essay, Arnaudo points out the three main strategies that allowed Scola to remain faithful to the “sense and the atmosphere” of the book as well as retain his personal themes and style. Firstly, the necessary changes owing to the different medium; secondly, the retention of two features (the thematic and the formal one) typical in his films, namely the gathering around a meal, and keeping history in the background of the characters’ story (as opposed its center), and finally, the elements that connect the specific identity of his film to Fosca. In doing so, the director created a “sister work” in which the

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Introduction

vampiric elements of Tarchetti’s book are translated into a realistic study of his characters, of the elements that, sublimated, become a metaphorical tomb of the Comedy “Italian-Style” and the birth of a new cinema for the director. Scola’s humanistic cinematographic approach holds some similarities with the one used by Archibugi. Daniela De Pau discusses how the director transformed Tozzi’s enigmatic writing—defined at the crossroads between Existentialism and Nouveau Roman—into a more realistic tale, using her usual intimist-realistic style. Archibugi, though, differs from Scola in her strategy because she inversely adapted Con gli occhi chiusi (1994) choosing to remain faithful to the plot and betray the spirit of the novel instead. By doing so, she ends up re-writing her own version of Pietro’s and Ghisola’s story, confirming herself as “narrator on the set.” The director introduced two main changes in order to present her visual narration. The first change was to reinterpret the story according to the teachings of Lorenzetti’s fresco, who wanted to illustrate how to serenely govern a city in his Allegoria del buon governo. The second change was to re-orient the spatial-temporal axes of the plot, in order to create a film with both a meta-historical setting and a linear story telling setting, where the reconstruction of events, denied in the book, could better follow the psychological explorations of the characters. Archibugi’s reinterpretation aims to take to the big screen a theorem of the spirit, together with Tozzi: living with the eyes closed results in having to face inevitable catastrophes. Another faithful adaptation, with an interesting spin, is the one by Cristina Comencini, who converted the story of her own best-selling book La bestia nel cuore, into a film of the same title (2005). It is discussed in Flavia Laviosa’s essay. Here Comencini’s adaptation process does not concern the betrayal of the plot, or the spirit of the original novel, but rather as she herself stated, the betrayal of herself. However, Comencini did introduce several structural changes in the plot in order to accomplish the transition between the different media. For instance, in the film version, she omitted the erudite Aeschylus’s frame and the more complex analysis of the father’s psychopathology, focusing instead on the human tragedy of sexual abuse as seen from the children’s perspective and who, as adults, have to find a way to live with such a heavy past. In short, Comencini was able to explore the theme of sexual abuse in two different ways: digging into the psychology in the book and exploring its memory with the film. The next essay by Manuela Gieri focuses on the Taviani's Kaos (1984), a film that faithfully takes Pirandello’s short story L’altro figlio as

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inspiration. While presenting it as only one of the four episodes within the film, the Taviani brothers used it as the thematic and stylistic guideline for the entire film. In fact, the main theme of the film, maternity, is also seen as a metaphor for Pirandello’s artistic creation of adapting the story from narrative to theater, which guided the Taviani in their process of translation into cinema as well. Starting with Pirandello’s challenging question on the nature of translation—whether it is possible to give to the same thought a different expression and soul—the Taviani brothers decide to confront such a question, and enlarge their views of the project, by infusing the filmic narration with a personal dialogue of Pirandello’s macrotext. Therefore, they included also the themes of traveling, fate, and the gaze—so fundamental for the Sicilian writer—and, in their “impossible” scope of translation, ended up trying to recuperate Pirandello’s thought in its entirety. The essay by Gaetana Marrone discusses how Primo Levi, the great memorialist of the Holocaust, inspired filmmaker Francesco Rosi to work on the scenario of La tregua in the early 1960s, though realized only in 1997. The critical debates over Rosi’s film attest to the director’s commitment to fashioning a cinematic equivalent of Levi’s novel: the true cost of a man’s soul becomes the most shattering measure of surviving in a world where the ideology of evil is the ultimate historical drama. La tregua raises many intriguing questions, which invite discussion such as how to recount events that defy language, and whether images are a stronger means of expression than words. The essay by Valerie Mirshak on Antonioni’s Le amiche (1955) functions as a transition between adaptations that intended to remain faithful to their original texts, and those that wanted to betray them, which is what the second collection of essays examine. Although Antonioni has declared that he adapted Pavese’s Tra donne sole (1949) without commitment to faithful adaptation, he chose two women, Alba De Céspedes and Suso Cecchi d’Amico, to pen the screenplay of the novel, because he thought they would be more sensitive in handling the story, and therefore more faithful to its female characters. With Cecchi d’Amico in charge of outlining the psychology of the characters, and De Céspedes handling their dialogues, the screenplay demonstrates that this sexual difference has had detectable and far-reaching consequences. By elaborating meaningful moments among these women, the female screenwriters converted a story about lonely characters, who suffered from a universal human malaise in solitude, into one in which these characters established tight bonds with each other, and lived out their specifically female experience with friendship and cooperation. When the story

20

Introduction

returned to male hands, Antonioni kept the emphasis on concrete and real experiences—which were derived from the personal experiences of the two female authors—and he was also guided by the two writers in the retelling of the story. He added elements that showed the contradiction and the struggle in the characters’ attempts (and ultimate failure) to maintain and preserve their close female bond. With such an approach, Antonioni, almost inadvertently, appears to remain faithful to all three writers, in his own particular way. Remaining with issues of gender, Gloria Monti’s essay examines Alba de Céspedes’ novel Nessuno torna indietro (1938), which challenges the standards and expectations of femininity during the ventennio period (1925-1945), a time when the boundaries of acceptable behavior for women were dictated by fascist ideology. She also examines the film version of the novel directed by Alessandro Blasetti, who also co-authored the screenplay with de Céspedes. If the collaboration between a notorious anti-fascist writer and one of the most prominent cinematic figures under fascism might appear contradictory, Monti reconciles de Céspedes’ and Blasetti’s political views by tracing the ideological transformation that Blasetti experienced throughout the ventennio, which led to his progressive distancing from fascism. The film was shot in 1942-1943, but its completion was delayed until the end of the fascist regime and the subsequent civil war in 1943. The film was not released until the end of the war, in 1945. By 1942, when filming started, Blasetti was no longer a member of the Fascist Party. However, scholarly works about Blasetti often dismiss his political development and simplistically categorize him as a fascist director. Instead, Monti proposes that the existing discrepancies between the literary voice of de Céspedes and the cinematic voice of Blasetti are motivated by the issue of gender rather than by that of politics. Stefania Benini’s essay introduces us to a director, Pietro Germi, who openly professed to the disregard of the text. While adapting Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (1957) by Gadda, into the film Un maledetto imbroglio (1959), Germi laid claim to the total paternity of the story, and treated the book as a pretext for making the first Italian film in “detective story” genre. Despite his efforts to reduce Gadda’s name to a mere vague reference, Germi’s encounter with the Milanese writer was a very important one, which influenced him not only in this film, but also in subsequent films, in particular when dealing with a comic style with a resentful and grotesque gaze. In Germi’s polemical attitude to literature, there is an echo of the French Nouvelle Vague debates of the time, which demanded the status of author for the director, and thought that drawing

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from literature was a sign of decadence for cinema. In retrospect, the relationship between the book and the film testifies to two different styles of narration: Gadda’s, which is characterized by a linguistic deformation, and Germi’s, which is marked by the construction of an agile plot. It does, however, also testify to a similar indignant outlook on life. Therefore, the two artistic works do not collide, but inhabit their own orbits, each in harmony with its own style. A case of confirmed text betrayal is discussed by Riccardo Boglione in his essay on La cagna (1972), by Ferreri, based on Flaiano’s novel Melampus (1970). Here, the director completely overturned the original text, destroying all the significant and characteristic components of the source text. The story of the book is in itself interesting: in fact, Melampus originated from Flaiano’s Melampo (1967), a screenplay that was rejected by many producers and that never became a film. Consequently, it already embodies changes typical of the passage from cinema to literature (for example, the addition of cultural references that apparently upgrade a script to “higher art”). In Ferreri’s hands, the story is “degraded” and, for this reason, enriched with a corrosive tone. The director overturns Flaiano’s idea of a melancholic and disillusioned intellectual who still pretends to serve a critical function, into that of the absolute uselessness of the intellectual in participating in any collective change. As the two artists’ visions were incompatible—for Flaiano cinema was sacred (as was literature), and its entertaining quality was something mandatory; for Ferreri it was just a means to try to change people’s conscience—Ferreri attempts not only a reversal of the contents, but also formally works against the grain of the book. As a result, the film purposely flattens the captivating and rich registers of the novel, turning it into a cold and distancing cinematography. A case of an impossible adaptation is outlined in Simone Dubrovic’s essay about Visconti’s dream of filming Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, of course, not in its entirety but around selected scenes and actions. The project failed and didn’t get beyond a screenplay. Despite this, Proust’s influence on Visconti’s cinema resonated well beyond this project, and is clearly noticeable in the film Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (1975), a film born out of Mario Praz's book Conversation Pieces (1971). The film closely follows Praz’s pictorial genre and content, with the presence of many of the paintings described in the book, and incorporates Praz’s method of portraying. However, this film also resonates with strong Proustian echoes, most notably in the fact that art is meant to compensate for the traumatic events and emotional emptiness in the life of the professor. The lack of metaphorical qualities in the film

22

Introduction

(which are considered indispensable for Proust in order to create art) in particular, and the insertion of a quotation from the Le coté de Guermantes about a tenant who represents the image of death, proves why cinema is regarded as abortive by Visconti, both with respect to Proust and to literature in general. Unlike the French author, who is able to find resurrection, cinema can only reveal death at work: in fact, for Visconti, the beginning of a film equals death. For the director, then, cinema ultimately means stealing images from reality, and collecting images that follow one another. By using Proust’s suggestions, the director points out why cinema cannot reproduce the mechanism of knowledge utilized by literature, and therefore why he could not adapt À la recherche du temps perdu. Federica Villa’s essay brings attention to the fact that the discussion of film adaptation cannot be restricted to a comparative approach between two works, but instead revolves around multiple factors. Vancini’s film La lunga notte del 43 (1960), adapted from Bassani's novel, exemplifies how problematic the question really is. The essay suggests that the relationship between cinema and literature can be analyzed according to three main strategies: the consideration of the specific historical context; the translation from one language into another (including everything that pertains to the quality of writing); the biographical recount of writer, of the screenwriters, and of the director. Seen in this relationship, Vancini’s adaptation is a film that inaugurates what will be Italian cinema in the sixties. In fact, thanks to the participation of Pasolini and De Concini in the screenplay, it transforms Bassani’s idea of Barilari’s responsibility for the immobility of his gaze into an historical immobility that incorporates the idea of temporariness and failure, typical of the new decade. The third group of case studies categorized as “strategies of translation” comprises essays that focus on adaptations whose main concern is to amplify certain parts of their sources, while remaining fundamentally faithful to them. Nevertheless, these adaptations by strategically shifting their attention to a particular matter, succeed in engaging in discourses that are personal, and independent from the literary material they “visualize.” Nicola Dusi’s essay on Zurlini’s adaptation of Il deserto dei Tartari, by Buzzati, perfectly underlines how the director, even while producing a film which is substantially more linear and realistic than its literary counterpart, imbues his work with visual elements that are an explicit attempt to recreate Buzzati’s famous “realismo magico” [magical realism] and mysterious atmosphere. Dusi’s analysis of two key scenes of the novel, compared one-on-one with their filmic equivalents, reveal that the use of the landscape, movements, colour and so on—via the

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suggestions of the metaphysical paintings of De Chirico, Sironi, Morandi, etc.—works to keep Buzzati’s aesthetic of emptiness and uncertainty alive. At the same time, Zurlini’s ideological standpoint differs from Buzzati’s because, as Dusi suggests, in the film the protagonist’s inability to leave the fortress arises from social constraints, whereas, in the novel, a mysterious force ties the soldiers to their location, which is something that gives the book a metaphysical flavor that the film only moderately explores. Jacqueline Reich, in her essay about two films produced during the Fascist ventennio, reveals how adaptation could be used to slip in seditious messages about concepts (in this particular case concerning the “sanctity” of family and female submission) highly regarded by a regime aimed, among other things, at perpetrating those reactionary ideas. Reich examines the film Sono stato io by Raffaele Matarazzo, which is the cinematic version of Sarà stato Giovannino, a contemporary play by Paola Riccora, deeply rooted both in the Commedia dell’Arte and the Neapolitan comic traditions. Helped by a remarkable interpretation of Edoardo, Peppino, and Titina De Filippo, the film, while retaining a superficial adherence to the regime ideology, shows a representation of the family that contains elements that should be disturbing vis-à-vis gender roles and patriarchal ideas of the family as propagandized by fascism. Ferdinando, in Maria Poggioli’s La bisbetica domata, has a similar intent. It is an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, in which the female-empowering message of the Bard is retained (expressed through Kate’s intellectual freedom). The “contemporary” reading of the classic also allows Poggioli to depict traces of the war in course, something rather rare in the cinema of period, and to firmly separate the private sphere from the public sphere, the former (i.e. the intimate nucleus of family), historically being a place of resistance against the latter, the authoritarian public domain. Georgina Torello focuses her analysis on the filmic rendition of Verga’s Tigre reale by Giovanni Pastrone, as an example of the director’s cunning close reading of literary texts. Verga’s work is permeated with textual recurrences that give Pastrone two opportunities. Firstly, the chance to elaborate on the femme fatale leit-motiv, something that had already become a trademark of the director’s previous work. In addition, and far more importantly, the chance to make visual Verga’s most salient literary strategies for the depiction of gender relationships that permeate the novel (love, family, one’s own strength, etc.). The paper explores Pastrone’s decodification and transcodification from one language to the other, paying special attention to the director’s cinematic techniques,

24

Introduction

especially subjective shots, and his intricate game of gazes (among and between the characters as well as the public). Piero Garofalo’s reading of I bambini ci guardano by De Sica, based on Cesare Giulio Viola’s Pricò, begins with a detailed genesis of both the novel, written in the mid-twenties, and the film, which started in 1942 and released in the fall of 1944. A reading of the evolution of the literary and filmic projects elucidates the different purposes and climates that generated the works, while underscoring the many affinities between the two outcomes. If De Sica and Zavattini projected the novel’s intimate tone onto the silver screen in a far more social and public light, the director retains many of the occurrences in the novel, and even its structure. The most significant change (i.e., Zavattini’s and De Sica’s reworking of Viola’s “crepuscularism” into an anti-bourgeois stand) is accompanied by audacious themes, practicable in literature, but rarely seen in films—more specifically the child’s oedipal attraction to the mother and the harsh treatment of infidelity. Ultimately, De Sica’s cinematographic vision respects Viola’s primary concerns, while translating Pricò’s private plight into a public crisis, though, as Garofalo suggests, such a filmic mediation does not allow De Sica to produce a direct denunciation of the status quo. Elena Benelli’s reading of the film that Faenza adapted from Tabucchi’s most successful novel, Sostiene Pereira, carefully traces the differences and similarities in the depiction of the central character of the story. In fact, in both instances, the construction of Pereira’s identity is the essence of the whole plot and is treated with equal importance. Nevertheless, while the voice of the storyteller changes in the novel from first person to third person, never really identifying itself—and so giving a rather destabilizing perspective to the reader who confronts multiple narrators—the film is keener to satisfy the viewer by clearly representing the narrator as an external entity. Faenza thus emphasizes the course of the events, and their political value, over and above the tone of mystery that saturates the book. The last group contains essays that focus on the blurred boundaries between books and films. Pasolini’s Teorema (1968) provides a great example of how fluid this relationship can be. Teorema originated as a theatrical piece and three years later it was simultaneously adapted into a novel as well as into a film, conceived according to a perfect amphibolic nature. Despite the differences between the literary and filmic genre, the main idea in Teorema remained unaltered in both works: the condemnation of the bourgeoisie, seen as a disease of the soul since it is regarded as being responsible for “cultural homologation”. To express such a concept, both the novel and the film challenge their own artistic

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statuses and try to escape the dominance of a particular semiotic system. Pasolini created a pastiche of styles; in the book, he uses the nouveau roman as an anti-narrative model and in the film, he uses painting and literature to challenge the filmic discourse. The irony is that Teorema wants to challenge modernism and realism, and yet in doing so, it operated as a quintessential modernist work in its effort to create a new language. Millicent Marcus’s essay on Romanzo criminale (2005) by Michele Placido and based on the eponymous novel by Giancarlo Cataldo (2002), shifts the focus of adaptation from one medium to another, in order to concentrate on Pasolini’s theories, and on the representation of the Roman sub-proletariat as the “common ancestor” of both works. Showing Cataldo’s literariness, or better still, his obsession with genre, Marcus pinpoints how the choice of a title, which reflects the aim of the book, privileges the genre (the novel) and, at the same time, embraces its literary history romanzo cavalleresco/romanzo criminale [the chivalry novel, the criminal novel], its hybridity, and its possibilities (polyphony, shifting register and incongruities). One of Cataldo’s more important destabilizing techniques is his “equivocal historicity,” the balance between the chronicle as the basis of this Roman “Banda della Magliana”’s narration, and the historical version of the novel itself. Placido’s film rewrites Cataldo’s ambient and combines, as an homage to Pasolini, his theory on the “cinema di poesia” [cinema of poetry] (made of “‘im-segni,’ the primal, pre-grammatical, hypnotic, irrational language of pure cinematic expressivity”) with the ingredients of the “cinema di prosa” [cinema of prose] “endowed with all the star power, narrative intrigue, hip visual glamour, and catchy sound-track”. Carlo Celli’s essay examines the time travel comedy Non ci resta che piangere (1985), by Massimo Troisi and Roberto Benigni, which does not derive from an adaptation. On the contrary, as is the case with films of a relatively high box-office achievement in the 1970s and 1980s, its success generated a “novelisation,” written by Anna Pavignano. A “novelisation” is a prose summary of the film, composed post facto, which can be a useful tool, as it provides an intermediary between the film, the film script (in this case unpublished) and the intentions of the authors. The film was neither based on any text nor adapted from an established play or novel. Instead, it was based on the comedy tricks of Troisi’s and Benigni’s theatrical experiences and success as comedians. This “novelisation” is, then, the antithesis of the improvisational impulses that produced the film. It is, at its essence, an anti-adaptation, which has lost the improvisational quality of the original, but has retained the themes of interest to the authors and the audience.

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Introduction

This section ends with another case for which the term adaptation is inadequate: Viva Paci’s consideration of Niccolo Ammaniti‘s book Io non ho paura (2001) and Gabriele Salvatores’ homonymous film (2003). Paci argues that both works are hybrid forms because of the presence of visual aspects in the literary text, and of the literary strategies in the visual text, which coexist in continual interaction, and demonstrate an interesting inter-media relationship. The idea of the novel stems from images, suited to the creation of a film. Later, Ammaniti, an eclectic writer, converted this idea into a book, and handled the screenplay as well. Precisely because of this idea of departure and return to the filmic, it is improper to employ the term adaptation to the film. The book preserves its genesis by including many codes of cinematographic language (camera movements, use of sounds, organization of time in sequence), while the film is suffused with literary strategies (various levels of enunciations, and the creation of a free, indirect style). Io non ho paura, as a film, surpasses the simple dichotomy between objective images and subjective images, employing the style of making the camera’s presence felt. These summaries are just a foretaste of the much richer, more meticulous, and far more detailed analyses contained in this collection of essays. While the definitive work on Italian cinema adaptations is yet to be written, the important contributions of the authors represented here should help to lay a sound foundation for such a work.

Works Cited Bonsaver, Guido, Martin McLaughlin and Franca Pellegrini, ed. 2007. Sinergie narrative. Cinema e letteratura nell’Italia contemporanea. Florence: Cesati. Bragaglia, Cristina. 1993. Il piacere del racconto. Narrativa italiana e cinema (1895-1990). Florence: La nuova Italia. Brunetta, Gian Piero. 1993. Storia del cinema italiano. Vol. 3. Rome: Editori Riuniti. Dall’Asta, Monica and Giorgio Bartellini. 2000. Italian Serial Films and “International Popular Culture”. Film History 3: 300—307. Costa, Antonio. 2002. Il cinema e le arti visive. Turin: Einaudi Fried, Debra. 1987. Hollywood Convention and Film Adaptation. Theatre Journal 3: 294—306. Gambacorti, Irene. 2003. Storie di cinema e letteratura. Verga, Gozzano, D’Annunzio. Firenze: Società Editrice Fiorentina. Marcus, Millicent. 1993. Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Mereghetti, Paolo. 1999. Il Mereghetti. Dizionario dei film 2000. Milan: Baldini & Castoldi. Micciché, Lino, ed. 1980. Tra una film e l’altra. Materiali sul cinema muto italiano 1907-1920. Venice: Marsilio. Mitry, Jean. 1971. Remarks on the Problem of Cinematic Adaptation. The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association 1: 1—9. Stam, Robert. 2000. Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation. In Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore, 54—76. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. West, Rebecca. 2000. Pagina pellicola pratica. Ravenna: Longo.

SECTION 1: THEORETICAL ESSAYS

TRANSLATION, ADAPTATION, TRANSPOSITION: A SEMIOTIC CHALLENGE NICOLA DUSI, UNIVERSITY OF MODENA AND REGGIO EMILIA

1.1. Semiotics of Texts, Semiotics of Cultures In contemporary semiotics, much debate revolves around translation. It appears to be a natural development of the constant focus on texts, whether examined singularly or in relation to one another. If semiotics is the study of signs, or rather, of systems of signification, then we can immediately declare that a sign is, first, a reference to something else, and that no system of signs or signification, and therefore no text, can ever stand on its own. In other words, as one can easily observe in the production of culture, all texts are supported by something else; they are produced, distributed, and absorbed, always circulating in a culture alongside other products and other texts that receive them, are associated with them, use them, cite them, and contaminate them. We agree with the anthropologist, James Clifford, who claims, “Pure products go crazy” (Clifford 1988). A mass of texts, or rather, a tangle of references in endless translation with one another. As Yuri Lotman would argue, translation constructs and, at the same time, dynamizes cultural universes. Studying texts, therefore, does not mean forgetting the contexts in which socially shared meanings are produced. There is no contradiction: it is a question of thinking, for example, of a film or a TV show drawn from literature not as a separate object, but as the point of arrival in the process. On the one hand, this process has strong connections with the sources, i.e. with the texts from which the cinematographic (or television) product draws its themes, images, structures, and methods of storytelling. On the other hand, what are set in motion are a negotiation and a comparison with the target culture, which is often radically different from the source text it receives and decodes. Thus, it is important to examine not only how the source text was adapted, but also the choices determined by the means utilized, as well as the choices linked to the logistics of production and

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audience captivation, which directly depend on the producers and the receivers in the target cultural system. This kind of translation always entails ties and limitations, but it also allows for new interpretative challenges. On exploring the way in which the key moments of a novel are illustrated, or how it develops into a film for cinema or television, the semioticians’ main issue is to try to account for the way in which text produces individual meaning. They will also have to examine the way it triggers the process of reciprocal translation that, in turn, opens up interpretative problems, and how all these interact with the addressee of the message.

1.2. Translating, Adapting, Transposing We are especially concerned with a specific issue, the discussion of which requires a brief summary of the current debate among Italian semioticians. In his recent book, Dire quasi la stessa cosa [Saying Almost the Same Thing], Umberto Eco argues that every translation is, primarily, a form of interpretation. According to Eco, when the expressive substance of a text is transformed, as when making a novel into a film, it is incorrect to call it a “translation”—as if it were an English poem being translated into Italian. In fact, the source text has been manipulated to suit the demands of the target text, to suit its limitations or to suit its new expressive potential. Furthermore, a film makes it necessary to show the “things left unsaid,” i.e. to make audio-visually explicit what the literary text merely hints at either implicitly or even partially omitting it. One of the examples Eco uses comes from Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed. In chapter 10, when telling the story of the nun of Monza, at a certain point Manzoni appears reticent: it is up to the reader to imagine how the nun falls into a state of perdition the moment she begins her affair with Egidio, because the narration remains suspended at the famous sentence: “La sventurata rispose” [The poor wretch answered]. It is the reader’s task to cooperate with the text, Eco explains, it is he or she who must give “voice” to that reticence, make hypotheses, and draw proper (or improper) conclusions from it. If this is allowed, or rather, is strategically constructed in writing, what happens in a cinematographic or television version of the written text? According to Eco, “la ‘risposta’ deve manifestarsi attraverso alcune azioni, sia pure suggerite da un gesto, da un sorriso, da un balenio negli occhi, da un tremore” [that “answer” must manifest itself through actions, whether they be suggested by a gesture, a smile, a gleam in the eye, a tremor] (Eco

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2003, 329). Therefore, the director and the screenwriter must make certain choices and decide what to reveal and how to reveal it, open up the implications of the story told by means of a physically different media. A film “based on” will then be, in each of its manifestations (from the actors’ faces to their costumes, from the lighting on the set to the framing of each picture), a question of challenges and decisions, i.e. a series of interpretations at every level of the literary text. It is no longer, then, a mere “translation,” but more precisely an “adaptation,” argues Eco, because in moving away from the literary to its representation, “l’interpretazione è mediata dall’adattatore, e non lasciata alla mercè del destinatario” [the interpretation is mediated by the adapter, and is not left at the mercy of the addressee] (Eco 2003, 95).1 While in literary translation the translator’s point of view tends to remain hidden (except in footnotes), in adaptations, according to Eco, the critical perspective becomes predominant. Eco is certainly correct in insisting on the interpretative stage of every transposition, but it is possible to explore other aspects as well and, as some scholars have done, propose a reflection that still refers to the relationship between a novel and a film in terms of “translation.” In agreement with Lotman, Paolo Fabbri (Fabbri 2000) argues that each system of signs can be translated into another system of signs. For example, novelistic writing can be translated into a film for the television or cinema, and when instances of “untranslatability” occur, it is a question of changing the strategy, in order to allow every fundamental element of the source text to come through. A translation from a novel, Fabbri explains, is always an inter-sensitive process, and therefore one must take into account all the meanings of the work, in order to understand and appreciate the film. For example, an emotion (which constitutes a central problem in the relationship between literature and audio-visual fiction) can be translated by using music, color, soft or strong lighting, or a combination of these various languages. Mid-way between Eco and Fabbri is Omar Calabrese,2 who defines translation as a textual and “individual” phenomenon, always tied to the choices and goals of a single product. According to Calabrese, translating means not only interpreting, but most importantly, transferring the meaning of a text to another product, along with the inevitable transformations. This means regarding translation not as something closed and permanent, but rather as a process that operates on the style of the 1 2

The same example can be found in Eco 2001, 121—25. The title of the monograph is “La traduzione intersemiotica.”

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target text to reformulate some levels of equivalence or similarity with the source text. Such a process always takes into account the meaning effects (communication objectives) that the novel wanted to create in relation to those which the new text (film or other) intends to maintain, eliminate, transform, or reformulate. Accordingly, Calabrese suggests an “innovative” translation of the source text: a method of translating that searches for the unique traits in the original text; for example, in a novel, it will seek those characteristics that constitute its aesthetic and peculiar nature, its originality. A translation of this kind challenges the text from which it proceeds, it reopens it and wagers “che anche per il testo-target possa assumere non solo la dignità di quello, ma anche aggiungervi una sua propria ulterior singolarità.” [that even the target text can take on the dignity of the source text, and add to it its own uniqueness, as well] For this reason, Calabrese explains, amiamo certe traduzioni niente affatto corrette, ma infinitamente migliori di altre che si appiattiscono sul modello, ma non ne colgono minimamente la natura. È per questo che può accadere che la traduzione cinematografica di un’opera letteraria (poniamo il Nosferatu di Herzog tratto dal Dracula di Stoker) ci appassioni più di un’altra traduzione letteraria (Calabrese 2000, 118). we love certain translations that are not at all accurate, but infinitely better than others that slavishly follow the model but fail to grasp its essence. And for the same reason, the cinematographic translation of a literary work (ex. Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu, based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula) may enthrall us more than the literary translation.

Instead of adaptation, then, we shall refer to it more properly as transposition. In the etymology of the word, the use of the prefix /tras/ (which is analogous to /trans/) entails both trespassing (as in “transgressing”) and “transferring” (as in “transfusing”), drawing attention to the act of going beyond the source text by passing through it or by multiplying its potential. Transposition, in the dictionary, is defined as “una modificazione della posizione di determinati elementi all’interno di un ordine preciso, precedentemente costituito” [a modification in the position of specific elements within a precise order that had been previously constituted] (Devoto-Oli, ad vocem). While the term adaptation brings to mind an inevitable form of reduction, speaking of transposition carries with it the idea of something that survives the passage from one text to the other, respecting differences and elements of continuity. However, in order to make this textual transformation successful, it is still necessary to keep

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Translation, Adaptation, Transposition: A Semiotic Challenge

in mind its objectives, among which that of addressing a specific target culture.3

1.3. The Spirit of the Novel or the Literal Meaning? A False Dilemma Most recent translation theories make a distinction between a “strict” (almost mathematical) equivalence and a “loose,” more flexible equivalence between texts. It is the latter we have in mind when we speak of the degree equivalence, where different degrees of equivalence are applied to the various translations. Semiotics proposes to think of texts as layered objects formed by mutually dependent levels: the textual layers one chooses to consider will determine whether it is worth discussing fidelity in the case of the transposition of a novel into a film, or not. Transposing means taking into account, for example, the main motifs and figures of the novel, the plot, the narrators who lead us or mislead us, and the literary forms by which all of the above is communicated. In short, it means considering the entire style of the source text. The challenge, then, becomes translating the style of the novel into film — if by “style” we mean the combination of the text’s expression and content form, logically “molded” by the enunciative strategies, as Christian Metz would argue (Metz 1995, 11510). Furthermore, when we speak of equivalence, we consider it not only in relation to the source text, but also as being always a dynamic, flexible and contractual equivalence, aimed at retracing the forms of communication that the novel had constructed for its readers, and rethinking them for its new addressee, the audience. In a translation or a transposition, a true communicative act takes place between the different cultures and semiotics. If a comparison or a conflictual relationship can be set in motion between the source novel and the target film, then it is the work of translators—from the screenwriter to the director—to adapt the said text to one’s own objectives, and at the

3

Another terminological observation: Sometimes the expression “reduction for the stage” or more often for a film, is used in the sense of “adaptation” or “transposition.” They are, in fact, two different things: when we use the term reduction we accept a slightly negative connotation, which considers a film and a novel as unequal texts that cannot overlap, and that always require trimming, reducing, and cutting. The same is true for the term adaptation. In this case the prevailing notion is of a translation process that regards the source text according to rigid parameters and the target text as the result of a constriction (Dusi 2003).

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same time, build a comparison of values, conventions, and norms dictated by the cultural systems to which the text belongs. A transposition (or “transmutation” according to Jakobson)4 clearly aims at emphasizing its implicit features. It suffices to think of the inevitable imposition of choices and semantic variations, of the connotative spheres that are culturally marked, and the unavoidable variations in discursive strategies. In analyzing a transposition, one is confronted with textual choices that gradually enhance the potential or the actual techniques of similarity, the strategies that privilege certain levels of relevance in the translational relation between the two texts. Indeed, translating an enunciation is not merely a question of seeking ways to transpose the “same” points of view of the story by means of focalization or “ocularization” (Jost, 1987, 77—78). Instead, it entails keeping in mind the global relation that connects the dynamics of expression to the enunciative and enunciational processes, pervading all levels of the text. In this sense we can refer to it as a textual strategy of transposition that can choose (or reject) equivalence or similarity in relation to the source text, a global enunciative strategy that activates the interpretative phase. A strategy that organizes the methods of syncretism of various languages in audio-visual semiotics is always a new interpretative choice: Which visual contrasts can be triggered or defused within the text? Which connections or fractures between the various languages can be actualized or virtualized? In fact, even on this level, a film already bears a communicative intention that can be identified through textual analysis, just as it does in other visual media.

2. Aesthetic Text, Syncretic Text: Levels of Relevance in the Analysis A syncretic text, such as film, contains multiple languages, and a transposition entails changes in matter, substance, and form of the level of expression, in contrast to a literary text. Thus, it is important to remember that every film should always be considered as an aesthetic text, in which 4

“These three kinds of translation are to be differently labeled: 1) Intralingual translation or rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language. 2) Interlingual translation or translation proper is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language. 3) Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems” (Jakobson 1959, 261, emphasis mine).

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Translation, Adaptation, Transposition: A Semiotic Challenge

the level of expression and of content both determines the overall construction of its meaning. The translations-interpretations that the new text proposes, by staging them explicitly or constructing them implicitly, will therefore include all levels of the text. Therefore, when analyzing an adaptation, or rather, a transposition, firstly it is necessary to clarify which level of relevance to follow. One might choose to limit the analysis to a comparison of narrative structures and, along that line, retrace the elements in the film that have been deleted, added, expanded, or condensed. Alternately, one might wish to consider the series of enunciative strategies and the overall construction of the story. Such a construction can be regarded as a mediation towards the production of discourse (whether actorial, spatial, or temporal), activated by the enunciation inscribed in the texts. Thanks to this mediation, the themes and abstract values that make up the universe of meaning in the literary work are converted into concrete and recognizable values, themes, and icons, i.e. into discursive configurations that, in a literary or audiovisual text, are always presented through specific points of view. The target text is thus transformed according to the strategies and translation techniques one chooses to adopt, all the more so when translating from single-medium texts into syncretic texts, which are inevitably different from the source text, even in the construction of meaning effects. However, what I would like to emphasize is how the source text—novel, short story, even comic book, painting, or even another film (in the case of a remake)—occasionally offers interpretative paths that can become, as I have argued earlier, actual re-semantizations (Lotman 1993, 113—14). If we accept the notion, in our analysis, that a translation is always an interpretation founded on polemical and contractual relations between the “addresser” (who enunciates or stages the narration) and the “addressee” (who is expected to listen, read, or watch it), then the process of translation/transposition can go in two possible directions. It can lead an audience to comprehend the sphere of meaning of the source text (a source-oriented approach), or it serves the need to transform the target text in view of the target cultural system (a target oriented approach). In my opinion, a hypothesis of equivalence between texts related by translation, can be found in a coherent reformulation of meaning effects that are analogous, though not necessarily identical, to those in the source text, but only if the film aims at maintaining this type of connection with the novel. Such a method may be less refined than others, which play with

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subtle references and inter-textual (and deconstructive) allusions, but it is, perhaps, more respectful towards the intentions expressed in the source text. As I argued earlier, the challenge of a comparative analysis that takes into account the phenomena of inter-semiotic translation applies not only to the strategies deployed by the target text (i.e. the movie) in the level of content, but also to the necessity of confronting these choices in the level of expression. It is precisely by pursuing an aesthesis in the level of expression that a cinematographic transposition constructs internal systems of resonance and signification that can be regarded as corresponding to the lyricism of the literary text. This is particularly true of semiotic relations occurring “on the explicit level of signs,” (Greimas 1984, 36) i.e. in semiotic terms, on the visual and iconic levels, since the iconic succumbs as an invariable to the figurative level in the relationship between expression form and content form (Greimas and Courtés 1979). This is achieved through enunciative strategies that can be made explicit thanks to a textual analysis. Such strategies aim at promoting a sort of inter-substantial equivalence of expression through the visual codes of the target text.

3. Levels of Equivalence and Local Tactics It is therefore possible to highlight some active levels of equivalence even between source texts and target texts, which, at first sight, appear to be very different, as is the case with a novel and a film. The latter may, in fact, represent a coherent reformulation of the former and share with it the construction of space or the emotional transformations of its subjects. A semiotic analysis can retrace the itinerary of translation, starting from the target text and working its way from the film back to the novel, in the belief that, as André Bazin argued (Bazin 1951), a good translation opens up and multiplies the source text. It can, we have argued, “resemanticize” it, making us rediscover it through its new interpretation. One can examine, for example, the value, narrative, and discourse not only of the two texts in translation, but also of the pragmatic and cooperative strategies inherent in proposing a privileged way of reading, and therefore propose a model reader and viewer (Eco 1979, 7). Thus, a transposition can also adopt a global strategy of “differentiation” concerning the literary text from which it originates, while maintaining, at the same time, some textual levels of equivalence and some areas of actual “inter-semiotic translation.”

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Translation, Adaptation, Transposition: A Semiotic Challenge

Such are the local tactics (to be distinguished from a broader textual strategy) that make it possible to speak of translatability among different semiotic systems, such as a book or a film. Translated by Marella Feltrin-Morris

Works Cited Bazin, André. 1951. “Journal d’un curé de campagne” et la stilistique de Robert Bresson. Cahiers du Cinéma 3: 12. Calabrese, Omar. 2000. Lo strano caso dell’equivalenza imperfetta (modeste osservazioni sulla traduzione intersemiotica). Versus 85/87: 101—20. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture. Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Devoto, Giacomo and Giancarlo Oli. 1990. Dizionario della lingua italiana. Florence: Le Monnier. Dusi, Nicola. 2003. Il cinema come traduzione. Da un medium all’altro: letteratura, cinema, pittura. Turin: UTET. Eco, Umberto. 2003. Dire quasi la stessa cosa. Esperienze di traduzione. Milan: Bompiani. —. 2001. Experiences in Translation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. —. 1979. The Role of the Reader: Exploration in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Fabbri, Paolo. 2000. Due parole sul trasporre. Versus 85/87: 271—84. Greimas, A. J., and Joseph Courtés. 1979. Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du language. Paris: Hachette. Greimas, A. J. 1984. Sémiotique figurative et sémiotique plastique. Actes sémiotiques, Documents 60: 36. Jakobson, Roman. 1959. On Linguistic Aspects of Translation. In On Translation, ed. Reuben A. Brower, 232—239. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jost, François. 1993. Kul’tura i Vzryv. Moskow: Gnosis. Lotman,Yuri M.. 1987. L’œil-caméra. Entre film et roman. Lyon: PUL. —. 1985. O semiosfere. Trudy po znakovym sistemam 17: 5—23. —. 1977. The dynamic model of a semiotic system. Semiotica 21: 193— 210. Metz, Christian. 1991. L'énonciation impersonelle ou le site du film. Paris: Klincksieck.

LITERATURE AND CINEMA: ADAPTATION, TRANSLATION, TRANSMUTATION, CITATION ANTONIO COSTA, UNIVERSITÀ IUAV

In Truffaut’s famous book-interview, Hitchcock provides a perspicacious retort to a question regarding the relationship between a film and its literary source: “You probably know the story of the two goats that are eating up tins containing the reels of a film taken from a best seller. And one goat says to the other: ‘Personally, I prefer the book!’” (Truffaut 1985, 129). This witticism is a poignant reminder that film and novel differ in their respective media’s differences. Hitchcock, who is referring to his film Rebecca (1940) based on Daphne du Maurier’s novel, evinces his impatience with such comparisons. Until Spike Jonze made Adaptation (2002), these types of issues hardly seemed to form a promising premise for a movie. In the film, Robert McKee, a renowned screenplay expert, plays himself (and a deus ex machina) and generously bestows his infallible advice on how to craft a blockbuster. McKee’s approach to the problem of transposition is of a practical-operative nature, which is typical of many screen-writing manuals (McKee 1997). Obviously other approaches exist. First and foremost, the historical one that has in its purview the diachronic relationship between cinema and literature. The theoreticalmethodological approach is, instead, concerned with both the investigation of issues arising from the two mediums’ different natures and the understanding of the semiotic and aesthetic mechanisms that form the basis of every adaptation. Finally, there is the critical-evaluative approach that addresses matters of reception and judgment, based on the results of the transposition. Naturally, in practice, these approaches blur such clear-cut distinctions; nevertheless, they tend to be characterized by a prevailing interest in the film’s source (i.e., source-oriented approach), or in the film in and of itself (i.e., target-oriented approach), or they may seek to keep both sides of the relation in play (Cattrysse 1992; Dusi 2003). This chapter will first

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consider some aspects relative to the rapport between cinema and writing, then after a brief excursus into the intersection of literature and film in early Italian cinema, it will focus on theoretical-methodological aspects pertinent to adaptation studies.

Writing and Cinema Understanding how writing and images are mutually implicated must precede any reflection on the tradition of written narrative in narrative of images. The first aspect concerns the insertion of writing (e.g., captions, inter-titles, details from letters, pages from books, quotes) into the filmic environment. In silent film, the caption supplants the spoken word (characters’ lines, narrator’s presence). At times the written word, be it on parchment or in printed books, is entrusted with a particular purpose in the incipit, almost as if to attribute mysterious resonances, or at least the written narrative’s prestige to the events about to be displayed. The shortening of distance between the mise-en-scène’s iconic nature and the captions’ graphic nature, however, should not be underestimated; it is a purpose that can be accomplished by the iconic elements that are integrated into the captions themselves (e.g., drawings that can recall schematically the events’ characters or objects, ornamental or set motifs) (Costa 1998). For example, the opening sequence of Carmine Gallone’s Malombra (1917), the first cinematographic adaptation of Fogazzaro’s homonymous novel, shows the pages of a book that have as their heading the film’s title (Malombra) and the production company (Cines) and display, at first, the names of the characters and actors (amongst whom is Lyda Borelli in the leading role), and then an introductory caption (“Part I / The Castle of Malombra, with its strange legends, stirred the fishermen’s imagination, at night”). The concurrence of images and written word is also relevant to (almost) all commercial film in what is referred to as the front credit sequence (De Mourgues 1994). With increasing frequency in contemporary cinema, such sequences are no longer external independent segments, but have, instead, been incorporated into the opening sequence. Exemplary in this respect is the veritable tour de force incipit of Robert Altman’s The Player (1992). During a single virtuoso plan séquence, the written cast and credits are superimposed over the presentation of the protagonist, his coterie, his work environment (a Hollywood studio), as well as over the introduction of an astounding series of references to the history of film, and furthermore, over the element that sets the story in motion: when the protagonist receives a postcard containing a death

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threat—again the importance of the written word. In other cases, the distances between the filmic mise-en-scène’s iconic nature and the symbolic nature of the writing are lessened through the use of animated graphics or other forms of hybridization between writing and image, following the techniques of writing’s iconization, as used in comic strips and cartoons (Costa 1998). Cinema presupposes writing in various phases and at various levels throughout the process of production and fruition—from the script phase (i.e., from the elaboration of a scenario and screenplay), to that of the reviews and the feature stories that evaluate the product and note its impact on social and cultural mores. It is true that the screenplay, as defined by Pasolini, is a “struttura che vuole essere un’altra struttura” [structure that wants to be another structure] (1972, 192—201): it does not have an autonomous value and its procedures are aimed at achieving something that transcends the dimensions of the written page. Nevertheless, the various phases of “writing” in a film (from the elaboration of the scenario in narrative form to the technical découpage) constitute sources of essential importance, not only for the study of a work’s genesis, but also to provide a reliable picture of those films that, as has unfortunately happened throughout cinema’s history, have either been lost or maimed by censorship. This conservational role also holds for those journalistic sources that record the various phases of a movie’s reception. Thus, on the one hand, writing appears to be implicated in the ideation of the cinematographic visual and, on the other hand, constitutes a trace of the role that it acquires in the imaginary of an epoch. These relations become far more complex if considered in the light of literary theory and film theory, rather than from a perspective of empirical observation. The conception of cinema as writing, in particular as ideogrammatic writing that sets ideas in a visible form much in the same way as phonographic writing sets sounds in a visible form, emerges from some of film’s earliest theoretical reflections. The American poet, Vachel Lindsay, appears to be the first to establish a relationship between cinema and ideographs: according to Lindsay (2000), who introduces the concept of “writing-picture,” the invention of cinema, in terms of importance, is comparable to that of the introduction of ideogrammatic writing. With greater theoretical development, though still firmly anchored in the experience of silent film, Ejzenštejn (1964), pursues a similar line of reasoning within the context of his reflections on montage. The French writer and director, Marcel Pagnol, went so far as to define the sound revolution as the all but perfect and definitive achievement of ideographic writing, since it is a synthesis of ideographic writing in its filmic form

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(silent cinema) and of phonetic writing in its phonographic form (phonograph and talkies) (Pagnol 1965). The expression “filmic writing” takes on its own particular meaning in semiologically inspired theoretical reflections. Filmic writing, a concept that emerged in France from the literary, philosophical, and linguistic studies of Barthes, Derrida and Kristeva, lies at the center of the “textual turn” of cinema’s semiology in the 1970s (Casetti 1993, 156—170). In fact, following its importation into filmic territory, this concept has provided an opportunity for exchange between different disciplines and cultural-linguistic fields—so much so that in the English academic environment the term écriture is now used to designate this issue (Stam, Burgoyne, and Flitterman-Lewis 1992). In the initial phase of semiotic studies (1964-1971), the focus was on cinematographic language and, therefore, research centered primarily on codes (both specific and nonspecific). Subsequently, critical attention shifted to film as text in order to understand the mechanisms and the dynamics that define individual films or groups of films (Metz 1971). In this context, there emerged the issue of filmic writing, understood as the functioning dynamic principle of the filmic text, which lives and develops through a complex play of accordance and resistance to the codes of filmic language. The influence of Derrida (1967) has been decisive in defining the concept of filmic writing. He developed a radical critique of structural linguistics’ phonocentrism and logocentrism and brought to the forefront the graphic nature of writing. In a similar vein, the works of Ropars-Wuilleumier (1981; 1990) invest the concept of filmic writing with the dynamic and unstable aspects of the trace, rather, than with those of the systematic and static linguistic sign. The Derridean notion of writing as trace, as the site where those tensions that seek to overcome the linearity of linguistics’ phonemic chain are displayed, found its application, in Italy, in literary studies as well. In this respect, Gianni Celati’s (1975, 53—80) essay on Beckett’s prose is exemplary for the way in which it intertwines writing and cinema. Celati invokes slapstick comedy’s gag-construction principle to define how Beckett’s writing overcomes the restrictions of the literary text’s mechanical repetitiveness (linearization) and representational closure (monumentalization) and embraces movement, corporeity, and gestures. The reference to film and to the heyday of American comedians (e.g., Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, The Marx Brothers) takes on particular significance in relation to a writer such as Beckett, who went on, fatally one might say, to make a film (Film, 1965, directed by A. Schneider), which is an extreme homage to the mask of Buster Keaton, the

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protagonist, but also the point of result of a writing programmatically taught towards escaping the text’s limits (Beckett 1972).1 Derrida, following his participation in Safaa Fathy’s film D’ailleurs, Derrida (1999), wrote about this cinematic experience (Derrida and Fathy 2000). In an interview with Cahiers du Cinéma, he acknowledged that it is possible to establish rapports between the concept of “deconstruction,” central to his philosophical thought, and that of film editing (Derrida 2001, 82). In his view, since the introduction and development of new computer technologies, writing, or rather discursiveness, and film editing have drawn nearer to each other; moreover, he argues that writing has, for some time now, participated in a certain cinematographic vision of the world. In reality, the idea of writing and vision interacting, nourished an entire season of narratological studies, in which the concept of focalization (i.e., the management of the narrative point of view—what the narrator and characters see and know) denounces, from the very selection of the term that is explicitly viewpoint-derived, its visual if indirectly cinematographic origins. So much so that in this context, theoreticians have made various attempts to develop a comparative narratology (Chatman 1978; Jost 1987). Undoubtedly since the advent of cinema, literature has experienced the influence of models of narration through images and movement. It also happens, at times, that critics and theoreticians resort to defining certain descriptive and narrative methods through the use of film metaphors. For example, Eco’s analysis of the incipit of Alessandro Manzoni’s historical novel, The Betrothed, in which the famous description of “That branch of lake Como” is defined as a series of zooms (Eco 1985, 253); or a curious expression by Genette who, in reference to Balzac, speaks of a “tracking shot” (1983, 59). Obviously the authors cited are not attributing the invention of the zoom, of tracking or of other cinematographic techniques to 19th century novelists. Instead these examples illustrate that film metaphors can assist in visualizing the relationship between characters, the narrator, and the surrounding world, following a technique that enacts what Eco called “inter-textual visual frames” (1979, 81), which is discernable both in a narrator’s and critic’s prose. From the grand narrative machines of the 19th century, cinema inherits an array of visual and visionary strategies that are put into practice thanks to the new technical possibilities. Nevertheless there are occasions in which film, both as a mode of representation and as an institution, finds itself implicated in writing: when 1

It hardly seems to be a coincidence that Celati himself, through his favorite narrative themes, experimented with film as happened in his wonderful 2003 documentary Visioni di case che crollano (Case sparse) (Costa 2003).

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there is a dynamic exchange between the cinematographic and literary models. The title of the concluding chapter of Hauser’s Sozialgeschichte der Kunst und Literatur (1951), “In the Sign of Film”, is a formula that synthesizes perfectly the idea of a strong interaction between the cinematographic techniques (primarily editing) model and the methods typical of early 20th century art and literature, from cubism to futurism and surrealism, from the poetry of T.S. Eliot to the prose of James Joyce. Moreover, various phases of the previous century’s literary writing can be interpreted “in the sign of film.” By way of example is the critical success in the inter-war period, of the American novel, in which, as Magny (1948), has argued in a prescient study that anticipated various issues of modern narratology, literary writing emerges as heavily indebted to filmic models. Sharing an analogous debt are those works that, although belonging to different geographical and cultural traditions, are sometimes lumped together under the definition of post-modern (Ropars-Wuilleumier 1990). However, it also concerns authors such as Calvino, whose Palomar (1983) not only privileges the purely visual aspect of the relationship subjectworld, but can also be interpreted as a type of inventory of perceptive and cognitive models through which humanity has refined its ability to establish the evolving diversity of the universe (Costa 1993, 45—61). In this context there is a lively presence of narrations based on descriptions of materials that are already at the stage of cinematographic, or at least visual, representation: from Claude Simon’s Triptyque (1973) to Tanguy Viel’s Cinéma (1999). In these and other cases, it is difficult to distinguish clearly between novels that take on cinematographic themes and novels whose writing draws explicitly on the model of filmic perception— especially with regards to defining spatial relations and the treatment of time (Clerc 1993). Actually, the entire literature of the 20th century has introjected modalities of vision that film has made familiar and, at the same time, has borrowed from film themes that are strongly linked to a new status of the visible and the new configurations of the social imaginary. From its earliest days, the cinematic world has provided writers with infinite inspiration as Luigi Pirandello’s novel Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (1915; originally appearing under the title Si gira; [Shoot! The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator] effectively demonstrates.

Word and Image Since its beginnings, film has had ample recourse to a repertoire of literary texts (e.g., novels, dramas, comedies, and fairytales): first and

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foremost as a source of inspiration, but also so as to take advantage of the strong appeal of familiar works. In the very notion of transposition, there lies a promise of visibility: to show, at last, that which until then had been only imagined. The theatrical practice of staging novels long precedes that of cinematographic transposition: it was already a widespread occurrence in the first half of the 19th century. Siegbert Prawer purposely cites the double performance held at London’s English Opera House that proffered, in a single evening, stage productions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and John Polidori’s The Vampyr in 1826. Prawer compares this double performance to a double feature of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), that was shown more than a century later (1931) to the American movie-going public. He notes that the public’s demand to see the “film based on the book” and the concomitant benefits that this had on the sales of the “book on which the film is based” was not only anticipated in the theatre, but frequently these very same theatrical adaptations provided primary source material for cinematographic transpositions (Prawer 1980). After all, one of early cinema’s first international successes, Georges Méliès’s Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902), which is derived in part from at least two novels by Jules Verne (De la Terre à la Lune,1865; Autour de la Lune, 1870), incorporated several ideas from Jacques Offenbach’s operetta Le Voyage dans la Lune (1875), which had been staged at the Théâtre de la Gaîté and directed by Adolphe d’Ennery. In fact, Georges Méliès’s Star Film catalogue constitutes a corpus that documents in exemplary fashion the production practices—in terms of cinematographic transpositions of literary texts—one of the first production companies in the nascent industries. From its pages emerges a Méliès who adapted anything and everything to film: from Perrault’s fairytales to Shakespeare’s dramas, from Robinson Crusoe to Gulliver’s Travels, from The Barber of Seville to The Surprising Adventures of Baron Münchhausen, from Goethe’s Faust (perhaps filtered through the works of Gounod and Berlioz) to Haggard’s She. Of the original works, however, other than the reference to the title or to a character (for example, Méliès’s favorite character in Faust was of course Mephistopheles, whom he personally portrayed), Méliès incorporated only a few cues for the presentation of one or more spectacular actions, carried out by means of his repertoire of special effects, which defined both the rapid rise and the just as rapid decline of his “views.” Technical advancements and the evolution of film language soon permitted even more precise comparisons with literary narratives, whether of a highbrow or popular status, as the development of this phenomenon in

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Italian cinema shows. In this regard, Brunetta (2003, 22—27) speaks of an “Italian’s library” that has been transformed into a film library. From Dante’s Divine Comedy to Fogazzaro’s Malombra, from Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered to Collodi’s Pinocchio, there is not a single significant Italian literary work that has not been repeatedly adapted to the screen. Naturally these productions do not take into account the considerable attention that Italian cinema reserved for international literary texts. Of these works, primacy goes to the great historical novels, set in the ancient world, for their frequent screen adaptations, perhaps following such successful theatrical productions, as Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii and Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis. Nevertheless, it is the Divine Comedy, in particular, the Inferno, which assumes a role that in many respects, is foundational in Italian cinema. Dante’s Inferno (1911) by Adolfo Padovan, Francesco Bertolini, and Giuseppe De Liguoro and produced by Milano Films, while not the first film inspired by Dante’s opus, is universally considered to be Italian cinema’s first feature-length film. In addition, it constitutes one of the earliest organic examples of the process to adapt a literary work of high culture to the filmic performance’s demands by passing through the model of Gustave Doré’s popular engravings. In early cinema, the relationship between cinema and literature must be interpreted in the context that Noël Burch (1990) called the Primitive Mode of Representation (PMR) and which, he argued, was supplanted by the Institutional Mode of Representation (IMR). While the former concerns the period in which cinema was but one amongst several attractions offered in entertainment venues, the latter coincides with cinema’s progressive command over the ability to narrate and to represent even very complex events and, therefore, to compete with theatre and literature. The PMR is characterized by the image’s frontality and by the camera’s fixity; by the lack of spatio-temporal articulations and, therefore, by the lack of narrative; by the shot’s “autarchy” to which an “exteriorization” of the narrative and commentative function corresponds. This is entrusted to a speaker’s voice and to musical accompaniment. In stark opposition to the PMR, the IMR is characterized by the “grand narrative form” based on the discontinuity of images (alternating scale of shots) and on the “linearization” of various signifying elements. From this it becomes clear that only after the passage from one representational mode to the other does cinema acquire the capacity to articulate completely its own narrative approach, distinct from that of the literary one. The captions—the written word that both compensates for the lack of voice in silent film and performs descriptive and narrative functions—play

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an important role in this passage. In what has been called, the classic Hollywood style, the permeability and integration of captions in the narrative system occur not only on the basis of the narrative’s primacy that subordinates all other aspects of filmic expression, but above all on the basis of “functional equivalents,” that is the principle by which the narrative development can be sustained equally by the various elements of filmic expression, including captions (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 1985). In European cinema, however, different tendencies develop in terms of both the pure and simple exhibition of attractions and the subordination to the primacy of the action and narration. Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914), which did exert a certain influence on American cinema, is heavily dependent on literary models, as much in the overflowing presence of the poetic word in the captions (composed by D’Annunzio), as in the choreographic use of camera movements. Movements utilized in such a way as to give life to a composition that clearly aspires to prosody and metre (symmetry, anaphora and “rhyme”): in other words, methods prevail that anticipate in certain respects what the Russian formalists, first, and Pasolini, later, would call the “cinema of poetry.” The mythical aura and authentic popularity of celebrated literary and theatrical classics guaranteed cinema an inexhaustible reserve of resources to exploit on an impressive scale. To the literary source’s appeal, cinema added both the allure of shooting in actual locations and the name recognition of the starring actors. The participation of a renowned actor was a guarantee of success, equal to that of views of art cities. The FAI’s (Film d’Arte Italiana [Italian Art Film]) Shakespearean productions are part of just such a tendency. The Merchant of Venice (1910) features Ermete Novelli who, along with actual location shots of Venice, is the film’s main attraction (contemporaneously, Novelli also performs in a King Lear production alongside Francesca Bertini). This same formula (renowned actor plus location shots of Venice) provided the basis for FAI’s production of Othello (1909), which was directed by Gerolamo Lo Savio and included performances by Ferruccio Garavaglia (Othello) and Cesare Dondini (Iago). As previously mentioned, Dante’s Inferno, the first feature-length film produced in Italy, was fundamental to Italian cinema’s artistic and industrial development. Thus, in addition to the literary histories, Dante’s name also appears in the first chapters of Italian cinema’s histories. When Italy’s nascent film industry embarks upon increasingly complex and demanding productions, it turns to Dante’s text, which is encompassed like

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no other by an aura of prestige and classicism while at the same time, firmly rooted in the popular imaginary. Through the filmic version of the Inferno, Italian cinema forges a link between high and popular culture, and discovers a creative inlet into the thematic and iconography of the romance genre of a gothic horror vein: a vein that, elsewhere, draws on sources of a completely different nature and of less prestige than the Dante model. The extremely composite nature of this operation is reflected in the publicity hype orchestrated by the film’s distributor, Gustavo Lombardo, in the pages of Lux. In this magazine serious articles, such as Giulio Capra Boscarini’s “The Demo-Aesthetic Role of Film”, and complacent tidbits on prestigious intellectuals ranging from Benedetto Croce to Matilde Serao (both of whom were present at the film’s première) share the printed space with goliardic pranks such as the raucous parody of Dante’s poem, in which the poet, back in the land of the living, tries to avoid paying for the movie ticket to see the film based on his poem (Costa 2002a, 33—36). Milano Films’ production was unexpectedly anticipated by Velletri’s small production company, Helios Film, which distributed its own version of the Inferno. The superiority of means, of artistic commitment, and of overall quality of Milano Films’ production (1200 m. in length and 54 scenes compared to Helios Film’s production of 400 m. in length with 23 scenes and 18 captions) is evident. Both films draw on Gustave Doré’s engravings, implicitly confirming the popularity that these illustrations enjoyed;2 and both films seek to imbue the natural settings with fantastic valences. Both films concentrate on the same episodes (Paolo and Francesca and count Ugolino) in Dante’s poem, just as their narrative solutions (e.g., the use of flashbacks) are the same. In the Helios production,3 a greater sense of naïvité as well as a greater sense of uninhibitedness (there is a frontal nude scene of Francesca) make the “illustrative” approach that characterizes both films slightly less tiresome than the Milano Films version in which this illustrative format proves overly restrictive. From this point of view, the foundational value of Milano Film’s Dante’s Inferno has to do also with the primacy of the word (literary or poetic—whatever one wishes to call it), which characterizes the development of Italian cinema to Cabiria and beyond. 2

Dated 1861, Doré’s Dante-inspired engravings had an enormous diffusion because they were as Mattalia writes, “profoundly narrative in the popular sense of the word […] with just enough naïf” to allow the viewer “to cross into the oneiric” (1980, LXVIII). 3 Giuseppe Berardi and Arturo Busnengo directed Inferno for Velletri’s Helios Film. The film was recently restored by the Filmoteca Vaticana and screened at various festivals (Pordenone, Venice).

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Substitutive Images The most frequent change that a novel undergoes in cinematographic transposition concerns the choice of the ending. This phenomenon occurs not only in commercial cinema, but also in auteur cinema, as is the recent case of Silvio Soldini’s Brucio nel vento (2002) based on Agota Kristof’s novel Hier. Notwithstanding the considerable effort put forth by the director and his screenwriter, Doriana Leondeff, to transpose Kristof’s desolate and oppressive universe into images, the ending was changed. The adoption of a different ending, more reassuring but less coherent than in the novel, is the result of a conflict between the rights of the director and those of the producer, between respecting the spirit of the original work which the director follows as much as possible in the script revisions and directorial decisions, and the contractual clauses that designate changes of this nature within the purview of the producer who purchased the transposition rights from the publisher. Over a century of film history presents a practically inexhaustible number of transposition case studies, characterized by different adaptation methodologies and different degrees of fidelity. There is the extreme case of the physical presence of the author, who reads his own text as happens in Jean-Marie Straub and Danièlle Huillet’s Fortini/Cani (1976), a film which is more “about” than based “on” Franco Fortini’s I cani del Sinai (1967). In this film, made from the dramatic diary that Fortini kept during the Six-Day War (June 1967), the hic et nunc of the reading of the text is perfectly restored by the audiovisual reproduction, whereas the act of reading and the surrounding physical space propel the spectator towards that “elsewhere” to which the text provides access (but which remains within the realm of the imaginary, precisely as occurs during the process of reading). In many ways an opposite case is proffered by Federico Fellini’s Intervista (1987), in which the great director is struggling with a cinematographic transposition of Franz Kafka’s America. It is a film that Fellini will never complete, but nevertheless its adaptation continues to draw considerable critical interest. In this case, the hic et nunc of the film that is made (Intervista) becomes the sight of the text’s (America) inaccessibility. Between these two extremes there are a vast variety of situations that could be considered, on a case-by-case basis, to be adaptations, translations, transpositions, abridgments, transfers, rewritings (or transcriptions) or citations. The various terms used to define this operation reveal the different perceptions or aspects of the phenomenon. The nuanced phrases employed to indicate the passage from the literary work

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to the screen, often seem to refer to an obstacle, a difficulty posed by the distinct natures and by the distinct purposes of the two mediums. On the other hand, the terms that are generally used are linguistic indicators of an attitude that subordinates the cinematographic medium to the effect of meaning produced by the literary text: a type of priority that seems to allow limited possibilities for manoeuvring and, at the same time, which requires a series of “corrective” interventions. Nevertheless, there is a term that, however imprecise, appears capable of summarizing all the other terms: filming. Here is an example taken from the first page of a study devoted to Proust and film that opens precisely with the question: “Peut-on filmér À la recherche du temps perdu?” [Is it possible to film À la recherche du temps perdu?] (Kravanja 2003). That such an operation is problematic is amply attested by the three Recherche-inspired films analyzed in Kravanja’s study: Volker Schlöndorff’s Un amour de Swann (1984); Raúl Ruiz’s Le temps retrouvé (1999), and Chantal Akermann’s La Captive (2000). Even more indicative than these are the numerous projects that were never completed by directors such as Visconti and Losey in collaboration with writers such as Ennio Flaiano and Harold Pinter. These unfinished projects are transpositions that remained at the scriptwriting stage and never became (or perhaps have not yet become) films. Alongside these unrealized Proust-transpositions, there are others that have not professed their debt to the Recherche, such as Jon Jost’s All the Vermeers in New York (1990), which, although without an acknowledgment in the opening titles, could be considered a freely inspired transposition of La Prisonnière (Costa 2002b). Certainly it is possible, whether asserted explicitly or not, to film anything: not only narrative works. It is possible to film poems, as in the case of Stefano Consiglio’s La camera da letto di Attilio Bertolucci (1992), in which the poet is filmed while performing an unabridged reading of his poetic work. Moreover, it is possible to film art history lessons, as with Roberto Longhi’s Breve ma veridica storia della pittura italiana, which underwent an audiovisual transposition. Produced by the LUCE Institute and directed by Maria Bosio (1999), the film stars Sandro Lombardi in the role of the renowned art critic who holds class at Rome’s Liceo Visconti. Or there is the case of Didier Baussy-Oulianoff’s documentary, Tintoret d'après Jean-Paul Sartre ou la déchirure jaune (1982), which proclaims from its very title to be a cinematographic transposition of Sartre’s writings on the Venetian painter. Nevertheless these are quite marginal phenomenon with respect to the significant incidence of works of fiction, although in all likelihood the ever expanding

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circulation of audiovisual materials on multi-medial supports will provide increased developmental possibilities for this type of transposition. For works of fiction, the term filming, while suggestive and effective, makes it clear that there exists a narrative universe, with its own places, situations and characters, a world that is already furnished and inhabited. With respect to this narrative universe, the cineaste’s work would consist in simply filming, more or less following selective criteria along the lines of how a film crew operates when it arrives on location, for instance a tourist resort, to shoot a documentary. Although that is not how matters stand, nevertheless in the impressions evoked by this expression, there is an essential core: beginning with the specific means of literary narration (the word), a literary text constitutes a universe endowed with a series of identifiable traits on the visual level, where the cinematographic mise-enscène must effect choices based on its own specific means. Marcel L’Herbier, in reference to Feu Mathias Pascal (1925), justly considered the best of the films based on Pirandello’s celebrated novel, wrote: Filmer c’est donner la parole à la réalité. La réalité n’a pas eu un mot à dire dans l’adaptation C’est qu’elle n’avait pas des MOTS pour s’exprimer. Elle ne s’exprime que par les IMAGES qu’elle donne d’elle. Tautologie ou pas. Il est évident que le travail des images ne puisse se calquer fidèlement sur le travail des mots et qu’il faille inventer à chaque instant quand on est derrière une caméra pour l’orienter vers les images de substitution (L’Herbier 1979, 119). Filming means to allow reality to speak. Reality did not have a say in the adaptation because it did not have words to express itself. Reality expresses itself only through the images that it provides of itself. Whether a tautology or not, it is evident that the work of images can not faithfully trace that of words and that it is necessary at every moment to invent when one is behind the movie camera in order to direct it towards substitutive images.

The cineaste’s dialogue with the real universe, to which the literary text refers, is not limited to the dialogue with that real universe evoked by the literary medium, but also includes a dialogue with the tools employed. The question of equivalences concerns not just the level of content, but first and foremost, that of expression. Against this typically French tradition of equivalency research, there was the position assumed by the Nouvelle Vague auteurs, who had been deeply influenced by André Bazin. In analyzing Bresson’s film Journal d’un curé de campagne (1959) based on Bernanos’s novel, Bazin points out that what is being transposed is the

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“literary text” rather than the subject of narration. In other words, the raw material of Bresson’s film is Bernanos’s literary text and not the sequence of narrated events. Developing these types of intuitions, Truffaut not only carries out a detailed indictment against the adaptations of Aurenche and Bost (Truffaut 1987), but figures out how to complete the courageous cinematographic transposition of Jules et Jim (1962) based on the constant presence of Roché’s text—of its rhythm and strength of evocation. Truffaut maintains the text’s literariness (safeguarded as such) and, at the same time, proposes his own mise-en-scène that constantly reinvents it. If the idea of transposition, as understood in this context, presupposes a transferability of the text as such, that of abridgment and of adaptation seems to refer to the need to confront size-related matters. Adaptation suggests the need to organize something in a space that is not properly its own. Abridgment is even more explicit with regard to differing dimensions: something that is too large to find a space within the narrow confines of a film. Though given the length of the average film, this is a very tangible problem. The adaptation, however, can also refer to the opposite process: the transformation from little to big, as in Alessandro Baricco’s “little” monologue Novecento that is “adapted” to the needs of the big screen to become Giuseppe Tornatore’s The Legend of 1900 (1998). To clarify more precisely, on a conceptual level as well, what the use of the terms adaptation and abridgment entails, Metz’s distinction between vehicle [véhicule] and program [programme] is useful: if a sonnet, as a metrical form, is the vehicle, the topic addressed, for example a sunset, would be the program (Metz 1971, 185). Considering that in the organizational lay-out of the film industry, dating back to the 1930s, a film is normally understood to be an audiovisual text of a length ranging on average from between 90 to 120 minutes, and then the matter of vehicle is a significant aspect of an abridgment or an adaptation. In the case of Schlöndorff’s film, Un amour de Swann shares the program of Proust’s Recherche of the same title to a certain degree, but it is at the level of vehicle that the most outstanding differences are concentrated, entailing a series of notably different linguistic, stylistic, and expressive choices. Thus, one could say that the decision to qualify a transposition as an adaptation or an abridgment is an immediate reference to the matter of vehicle, which in turn, determines a series of variations at the level of program. It is precisely on the latter level that the various methodologies of analysis and the respective theories of reference engage: those based on the classic distinction, introduced by the Russian Formalists, between fabula and sjuzhet (i.e., between story and plot, between the narrative content and the form in which it is presented) (Kraiski 1972); or the

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narratological studies based on the distinction between story and discourse (Chatman 1978); or the more recent studies that attempt to establish the various competencies of practices of adaptation (McFarlane 1996), of transposition, and of translation (Dusi 2003; Eco 2003). An examination of the broad range of critical-theoretical literature available demonstrates that each one of these terms may be used with differing meanings depending on whether it is understood literally or whether it is taken in a more or less metaphorical sense. Understandably, the term translation, frequently used in non-specialized contexts, contains a reference to the fact that in the passage from novel to film there is a transformation that is determined by various codes or at least by languages endowed with differing specificities. If, however, one passes from the level of common discourse to that of sectional expertise, it becomes clear that the approach changes: in this case then translation refers to a specific theory, that of inter-semiotic translation (i.e., between different semiotic systems as are, to wit, a literary text and an audiovisual text). Within the broader scope of a study on problems in translation, Umberto Eco (2003) suggests a primarily metaphorical use of the term “inter-semiotic translation,” and instead proposes to adopt the term transmutation with regard to cinematographic transpositions of literary works and to consider the adaptation as a “new work.” Referring to Death in Venice (1971), Eco observes that Luchino Visconti respected the fabula, the characters and the settings of the Thomas Mann’s narrative, but not the profession of the protagonist (who in the film becomes a musician). In so doing, the Italian director has, in Eco’s view, “tratto spunto dalla storia di Mann per raccontarci la sua storia” [drawn on Mann’s story to tell us his story] (Eco 2003, 337—341): his transposition can therefore be considered as a “trasmigrazione di un tema [transmigration of a theme]” (Eco, 2003, 337—341). Analogous considerations could be made, albeit in differing proportions, for Gabriele Salvatores’s film I’m Not Scared (2003), based on Niccolò Ammaniti’s homonymous novel. In this case, it is possible to affirm that the cinematographic transposition renders explicitly those intertextual relations that are implicit in the novel thereby rendering distinguishable the transmigration of themes that had been merged in the novel from their sources in genre literature and cinema. A film needs to be judged on its own merits, independent of the text on which it is based. This statement is often repeated by both directors and writers alike; and it is a statement that is difficult to challenge. Frequently it happens that the majority of the viewers who determine the success of a film are unfamiliar or completely unaware of the work on which the film is based. Moreover, a film that is less than faithful to the source text may

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prove viable from both a commercial and a critical standpoint. Nor is fidelity always a guarantor of success. In fact, it sometimes happens that an extremely successful film is derived from a rather mediocre work. As Tullio Kezich (1986, 80) justly noted with regard to films based on literary works: “più che la fedeltà, l’attendibilità o il valore artistico della trasposizione cinematografica, contano l’alone che riescono a suscitare, la forza mitizzatrice che emanano, il fascino che esercitano sulle masse” [what counts, more than the fidelity, or the credibility or the artistic value of the cinematographic transposition, is the aura that they are able to elicit, the mythologizing force that they emit, the fascination that they exert on the masses]. There is certainly an “aura effect” that literary and filmic texts mutually exchange. A novel’s shelf life is extended even by unfaithful transpositions. Similarly, films attract audiences also thanks to the mythic force of literary titles and characters. This effect, then, confirms the idea that a cinematographic transposition of a text may be enjoyed, evaluated, and interpreted on its own terms. However, from the moment one considers the co-existence of two texts and examines, for whatever reason, their relationship, which is never unequivocal but calls into play other texts, the relationship becomes inter-textual and inter-media (for example from the standpoint of citations, allusions, pastiche, parody, and, in the case of plagiarism), in that the same use of literary texts activates reference models that are already established in other media. This dynamic is amply demonstrated by much of contemporary literature regardless of whether it falls under the label post-modern. Translation by Piero Garofalo

Works Cited Bazin, André. 1959. Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? Vol. 2. Paris: Éditions du Cerf. Beckett, Samuel. 1972. Film. London: Faber & Faber. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. 1985. The Classical Hollywood Cinema. Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press. Brunetta, Gian Piero. 2003. Guida alla storia del cinema italiano. Turin: Einaudi. Burch, Noël. 1990. Life to Those Shadows. London: BFI. Casetti, Francesco. 1993. Teorie del cinema 1945-1990. Milan: Bompiani. Cattrysse, Patrick. 1992. Film (Adaptation) as Translation: Some Methodological Proposals. Target. International Journal of

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Translation Studies 4.1: 53—70. Celati, Gianni. 1975. Finzioni occcidentali. Fabulazione comicità e scrittura. Turin: Einaudi. Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Clerc, Jeanne-Marie. 1993. Littérature et cinéma. Paris: Nathan. Costa, Antonio. 2003. Cinema delle pianure: “Case sparse” di Gianni Celati. Duel 103: 48—51. —. 2002a. I leoni di Schneider. Percorsi intertestuali nel cinema ritrovato. Rome: Bulzoni. —. 2002b. Nel corpo dell’immagine, la parola: la citazione letteraria nel cinema. In Cinema e letteratura: percorsi di confine, ed. Ivelise Perniola, 33—48. Venice: Marsilio Editori. —. 1998. Iconizzazione, narrazione, commento. Materiali per uno studio delle didascalie nel cinema muto italiano. In Immagine e scrittura, ed. Francesco Pitassio and Leonardo Quaresima, 199—210. Udine: Forum. —. 1993. Immagine di un’immagine. Cinema e letteratura. Turin: UTET Libreria. De Mourgues, Nicole. 1994. Le générique du film. Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck. Derrida, Jacques and Safaa Fathy. 2000. Tourner les mots. Au bord d’un film. Paris: Galilée. Derrida, Jacques. 2001. Le cinéma et ses fantômes. Cahiers du cinéma 534: 75—85. —.1978. Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dusi, Nicola. 2003. Il cinema come traduzione. Da un medium all’altro: letteratura, cinema, pittura. Turin: UTET. Eco, Umberto. 2003. Dire quasi la stessa cosa. Esperienze di traduzione. Milan: Bompiani. —. 1985. Sugli specchi e altri saggi, Bompiani, Milan 1985 —. 1979. Lector in fabula. Milan: Bompiani. Ejzenštejn, Sergei Mikhailovich. 1964. Forma e tecnica del film e Lezioni di regia. Turin: Einaudi. Genette, Gérard. 1983 Nouveau discours du récit. Paris: Seuil. Hauser, Arnold. 1951. Sozialgeschichte der Kunst und Literatur. Munich: C. H. Beck. Jost, François. 1987. L’œil-caméra. Entre film et roman. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon. Kezich, Tullio. 1986. Mattia Pascal: uno due tre. In Omaggio a Pirandello, ed. Leonardo Sciascia. Milan: Bompiani.

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Kraiskj, Giorgio, ed. 1972. I formalisti russi nel cinema. Milan: Garzanti. Kravanja, Peter. 2003. Proust à l’écran. Bruxelles: La lettre volée. L’Herbier, Marcel. 1979. La Tête qui tourney. Paris: Belfond, Paris. Lindsay, Vachel. 2000. The Art of Moving the Picture. New York: The Modern Library. Magny, Claude-Edmonde. 1948. L’âge du roman américain. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Mattalia, Daniele. 1980. Introduction to “La Divina Commedia” by Dante Alighieri. Milan: Rizzoli. McFarlane, Brian. 1996. Novel to Film. An Introduction to Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McKee, Robert. 1997. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and Principles of Screenwriting. New York: Harper Collins. Metz, Christian. 1971. Langage et cinéma. Paris: Larousse. The Hague: Mouton. Pagnol, Marcel. 1965. Cinématurgie de Paris. Cahiers du cinéma 173: 38—55 Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 1972. Empirismo eretico. Milano: Garzanti. Prawer, Siegbert. 1980. Caligari’s Children. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie Claire. 1990. Écraniques. Le film du texte. Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille. —. 1981. Le texte divisé. Paris: PUF. Stam Robert, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis. 1992. New vocabularies in film semiotics. Structuralism, post-structuralism and beyond. London-New York: Routledge. Truffaut, François. 1985. Hitchcock. New York: Simon & Schuster, New York. —. 1987. Le plaisir des yeux. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma.

FROM LITERATURE TO FILM: TYPOLOGIES OF TRANSFER RAFFAELE CAVALLUZZI, UNIVERSITÀ DI BARI

In order to address the relationship between film and literature, it is useful to begin with a particular form of reception of the cinematic work: the form of reception in which general audiences seek to determine, with films derived from literary works, whether or not the movie is faithful to the original text. As is evident, this sort of simplistic judgment tends to banalize the film’s aesthetic effect, reducing it to the most basic content. Yet if appropriately anatomized, it can be used as a distinct analytical tool that provides empirical results. This sort of analysis has lead us to identify a specific typology—from the simplest to the most complex—of at least four different types of filmmaking with regard to literary adaptation: a) the accurate depiction of a text, sometimes including the director’s recognizable creative touch; b) the adaptation of the source text to the director’s original point of view, and as a result, according to the range of his/her expressive means, his/her point of observation attaining maximum proximity to the literary work’s underlying—and thus more authentic— point of view; c) the interpretative reworking of the text’s form, both in terms of the screenplay and the product, with filmic effects of obvious merit and formal tension; d) the radical manipulation of the work on which the film is based, with formal results that are completely autonomous and original, and in some cases, even anti-literary. 1. The dignified depiction of literary works was a programmatic goal during an important phase in postwar Italian cinema. This has been called the period of “cinema calligrafico” [calligraphic cinema]. The beautiful writing and formal care found in its systematic reference to literary classics appear to be, on the one hand, a product of the waning of the facile populist or bourgeois-sentimental rhetoric of the Fascist era, and on the other, incisive figures of great interest and evident literary inclinations, such as Mario Soldati, Emilio Cecchi, Luigi Chiarini, Ferdinando Maria Poggioli, and others within the realm of Italian national cinema. In

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particular, if we consider emblematic two of Soldati’s most notable films from that period, Piccolo mondo antico [Old-Fashioned World] (1941) and Malombra (1942), both taken from novels by Antonio Fogazzaro, this elegantly depictive element, which clearly transcended the banality of the average production of the time, emerges precisely due to its close fidelity to the texts and their forms. Indeed, the use of witty expressions from Veneto vernacular is not only in keeping with the aims of Soldati’s notion of historical realism, but also corresponds to the spirit that Fogazzaro, in the last decades of the 18th century, wanted to express. A spirit that is parallel to—though distinct from—a realist poetic, a productive contamination of styles aimed at making his spiritualistic quest accessible to the public, which, as is well-known, was a departure from the dominant cultural and literary trends of the time. But what is most valuable about Soldati’s captivating formalism is its scrupulous treatment of period costumes and sets, which, much to the same degree as in the Vicenzian writer’s style, transforms the Piedmont lakes in the North, the mysterious marine element, into central symbolic factors in the evocation of atmospheres that are more crepuscular than aestheticizing (owing largely to the clarity of the “black and whites” of photographers Montuori, Gallea, and Terzano) with airy landscapes dense with ominous, overwhelming mist. On the other hand—and this is yet another peculiar element of Fogazzaro’s novels—the dramatic structure of the storyline hinges on disturbing and challenging portraits of women, played in these two films, respectively, by a deeply intense Alida Valli and the dazzling Italian diva of the period, Isa Miranda. Moreover, this is not by chance, for Soldati’s later films also devote much attention to the female characters, as in the Balzacian Eugenia Grandet [Eugenie Grandet] from 1946 and the Moravian La provinciale [The Wayward Wife] from 1953. This interesting element in Soldati, who meanwhile became one of the most important post-war Italian writers, corresponds to the filmic depiction of literary works by the great neo-realist director, Vittorio De Sica. In Ladri di biciclette [Bicycle Thieves] (1948), from the second phase of De Sica´s career, his approach to literature was clearly in contrast to his poetic which, precisely in virtue of the almost absolute autonomy and freshness of vision in his direct use of the camera, produced masterpieces like the above-mentioned film (based on the novel by Luigi Bartolini), Miracolo a Milano [Miracle in Milan] (written in collaboration with Zavattini, the author of the novel Totò il buono from 1951), and especially Umberto D, (1952). Perhaps owing to the international character his career had taken starting with the production of solid Hollywood stock films like Stazione

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Termini [Indiscretion of an American Wife] (1954) and La ciociara [Two Women] (1960), De Sica brought a work to the screen that, despite the dramatic wartime setting and his ability to win over audiences, did not quite manage to incisively render the intersection of his occasionally melancholy yet unifying poetics with Moravia’s humanitarian yet nihilist worldview. Rather, the film turned out to be an almost superficial hybrid of neo-realism, a far cry from the more ingenuous but authentic efforts of the forties. Even later on, in heart-wrenching and elegiac films like Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini [The Garden of the Finzi-Continis] (1970) taken from Giorgio Bassani’s novel, or especially Il viaggio [The Voyage] (1974), inspired by Pirandello’s eponymous novella, the combination of a cast of internationally established actors (in the former, Dominique Sanda, and in the latter, Richard Burton and Sofia Loren) along with the commercial machine eliminated the dense and desolate simplicity, singular originality, and lack of literary subservience with which De Sica had represented the Italy of the dispossessed fresh from the catastrophe of war just over a decade earlier. These films from his mature period, then, provide instances of quite relative fidelity, in which the craft counts more than the originality of inspiration. Particularly in Il viaggio, he reduces Pirandello’s fable to a sad tale of bourgeois love, thus subjecting Pirandello the storyteller to a betrayal that obscures every hint of decadence, and moreover, every avant-garde impulse of the poet of the meta-theater. Pirandello has also been present, although not always fortuitously, in more than a few cinematic adaptations. In the more distant silent era, Il fu Mattia Pascal (1925) by Marcel L’Herbier could be considered an exception, along with the later film of the same title by Pierre Chenal (1937), produced before the global conflict. Both were made in the register—somehow always at the limit—of the excessive, the picturesque and the baroque, the grotesque and the oneiric, while the more recent efforts of the Taviani brothers (Kaos [Chaos] from 1984, Tu ridi [You Laugh] from 1998 and Marco Bellocchio´s La balia [The Nanny] (1999), stand out for their quality. Surprisingly, Pirandellian alienation is much more alive in later films, made abroad and derived from other texts, such as Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street (from Chekov, 1994) and Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard (from Shakespeare, 1996). From theater to film, the stories most often represented consistently derive from Shakespeare. The highest quality contributions come from Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh, prestigious British actor-directors from two different periods. Yet in the aforementioned American film, Al Pacino, as well as Buz Luhrmann, favor highly original, effective

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interpretations: Pacino (Looking for Richard) reads Shakespeare, forcefully modernizing an art thought to be impossible in the postmodern era, and Luhrmann (Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet 1996) follows Shakespeare’s linguistic code with rigorous respect for the text, though at the same time twisting the entire ironic and geographical context by bizarrely setting it in the desolate suburban desert of a distorted modernday California—dark and mysterious, with the timeless pulse of violence and death. In Italy, Shakespeare meets his match in a film director with considerable talent in “metteur-en-scène”, Franco Zeffirelli. In fact, Zeffirelli is the “auteur” of the well-structured Bisbetica domata [The Taming of the Shrew] (1967) and Romeo e Giulietta [Romeo and Juliet] (1968)—which surpasses the earlier, though excellent work of Castellani (1954), a veteran of calligraphic cinema and neo-realism in his own right—and of an Amleto [Hamlet] (1990), which remains significantly attentive to the intense formal, Oedipal tragedy of the source text. Yet Zeffirelli also proves himself in his intelligently played role on the level of noble theatrical virtuosity in his literary adaptations of Giovanni Verga, Storia di una capinera [Sparrow] (1994) and of Jane Austen´s Jane Eyre (1995). Furthermore, in this respect, Zeffirelli is heir to the best director that Italian cinematography has ever known: Luchino Visconti, who nevertheless operates on a far more complex plane, and consistently maintains a highly original poetics and almost inimitable stylistic choices. Indeed, even in Il gattopardo [The Leopard] (1963) which, perhaps due to budget reasons, is not very far from the depictive form, Visconti’s vision of life is able to emerge because of his choice of making the character, the prince of Salina, as the focus of identification; that is, it emerges despite the Hollywood schema, especially in the spectacular Sicilian symphony of the whole and in his direction of the actors (Lancaster, Delon, Cardinale). In this regard, it must be said that Hollywood, in fact, proves to be a great alienating machine of the senses, as the almost exclusive source of popularization—and inevitably, of impoverishment—of literary works. Depiction, however, became popularization in countless works, from Gone With the Wind (1939), Little Women (in its various versions) to Doctor Zhivago (1965)—to name a few of the most notable masterpieces. This even occurs with a delicate poetic intimist like David Lean. Indeed, here the Hollywood system openly draws on the immense literary repertoire of both the past and present, assuming the function of an enormous emotional transporter, especially through the myriad of genres of stories brought to the screen. Among these stories, the primary reference points derive from the Western genre (in literature), not incidentally so but strengthened by

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this heritage and nourished by the broader tradition of the American popular novel, the melodrama, which even in the modern era, was always ascribed to 18th century frameworks and the ¨noir¨. However, the big productions and the gradual advent of Technicolor, historical and period films and biblical-religious films were all inspired, to a certain extent, by a simplified literary code, and were destined to spread worldwide and shape the very development of film, first and foremost in Europe. American melodrama from the thirties to the fifties—from Cukor to Wyler, from Minnelli to Sirk—still borrowed directly, along with media sensationalism, from the literature of the most established genres, the dramaturgic, sentimental structures that strictly adhered to the expectations and ideological demands of the lower-middle bourgeois masses. The explanatory system constructed by Hollywood was its main prop, founded on ancient, tried and tested literary mythology. Just think of the Venuses— from Greta Garbo to Marilyn Monroe—and their protean ability to adapt the “eternal feminine” to the universal sublimation of patriarchal Eros, in the era of mass society, with these divas’ amazing roles and contradictory, private/public performances marking the paths of their own lives. Yet the “noir”, whose expressionist inspiration becomes more and more evident (just consider the Lang model and the adaptation to the genres of a director like Billy Wilder (of European origin), whose career not incidentally culminates in a drama about a struggling Hollywood writer in the intriguing iconological narrative structure of Sunset Boulevard, 1950), is the most flexible genre, especially owing to a genius like Hitchcock, and is thus destined to last over time. The “noir”, in fact, became autonomous and free from patterns to such an extent that it overturned the typical one-way relationship between literature and cinema. It took cinema as a model of reference in literary research, of a genre revived for the long term, as the current moment continues to attest. Nevertheless, the high points in this nearly century-old affair are revealing, if for example one pays attention to the incommunicability of Antonioni’s films, considered alongside the success of the “école du regard”, or Tarantino’s pulp and its broad influence on the literary tendencies of the nineties. The powerful popularizing capacity of the Hollywood machine, especially post World War II, push Europe onto fairly analogous terrain. Take France for example, which had the great Abel Gance, and consider Autant-Lara’s films, which use the Restoration period and the early 20th century era, or even Renoir’s era, as their privileged time of reference and delight in the “belle époque”. Consider the strong reprise (compared to early cinema) of the “cloak and dagger” genre, à la Dumas, or the return to

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the 19th century of Hugo. The literary works of the 18th and 19th centuries were later destined for works of highly significant expressive adaptations in British film, such as in the works of Losey (The GoBetween 1971), Frears (Dangerous Liaisons 1988), and especially Ivory (The Bostonians 1984, A Room with a View 1985, Maurice 1987, Howard’s End 1992, The Remains of the Day 1993, The Golden Bowl 2000). Here the director’s creative touch certainly transcends depiction of the texts through the mature lens of a 20th century point of view, whether in dealing with themes of character ambiguity or rationalistic obsession shown as a hallucinatory cage of passions, or even the theme of destiny, defined by a perspective that, from sociology, rises to the intrigue of metaphysical allusiveness. Such characters also emerged in the American film The Age of Innocence (from Edith Wharton’s book, 1993) which Martin Scorsese set in the literary-historical foundations of his highly original poetic, with simplicity and elegance, adapted to the dramatic parable of the American dream. 2. Beyond depiction, what interests us now is the phenomenology of film in which the original point of view and formal re-composition across genres—where the meeting of poetics is a given—maintain various degrees of freedom in terms of framing, camera movement, and cohesion and reformulation of color, light, and figurative choices—which are all apt for translating narrativity into autonomous cinematic syntax. In this regard, one of the most significant practitioners of the particular relationship between literature and cinema is Stanley Kubrick, as is seen in the different moments and modes of his productions. The characteristics of Barry Lindon (1975) may in fact appear to be similar to the typical Hollywood code, but they are not: the film, in its enlightenment rigor, actually goes beyond it. One example of the “noir” is his The Killing (1955), but the themes and metaphysical sentiment found in his rigorous representation of the relativity of time, along with his unwillingness to make the misery of the human adventure credible, both conceal and reveal the aporias of the modern gangster story as its irredeemable loss. A Clockwork Orange (1971), for its part, is pure Burgess, and the appalling aspect of the violence in the writing is at times extreme, while The Shining (1980), with the anguish and mystery that made horror fruitful, perfectly depicts the existential problematic that propels the destiny of the writer— and the writing itself—well beyond any mere depictive formula. Like Kubrick, John Huston, who was attracted to literary sources from the start, interprets them more and more autonomously over time, and so his last film, The Dead (1987), is also his masterpiece. With the “dead” of

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memory and the elegy to lost happiness, the world of Joyce’s Dubliners is fully recreated with dense realism and perfect correspondence to the text. Although the attendant sense of the struggle of life is not suppressed, disillusionment becomes the mournfully mythologized image of a time that no longer exists, that has perhaps slipped away, like a missed opportunity, whereas before it had seemed complete. In the homes and celebrations of Irish families at the beginning of the century, in the neighborhoods of a city that lies at the heart of the literary-filmic plot, the essence of the heart-wrenching, ever-pressing metaphor of somber, vivid memories. Yet it is in melodrama, in the broadest sense of the term, that in Visconti becomes the highest aim of a sincere “recherche” between adaptation and interpretative revision, which from Senso to Morte a Venezia [Death in Venice] comes to represent more and more acutely, the melancholy, refined prelude to the terrible event of the short century,” from the perspective of “decadence” that is at once dramatic and morbid passion, lyrical theatricality of images, musical echo and fatal obsession. Thus Senso, in 1954, is the product of a sort of extended dramatization of current events (and the novella by Camillo Boito) extended to the novel, the emblematic, nihilistic foreshadowing of the “finis Austriae.” For this reason, the story of the two unfaithful lovers expresses the fervor of the senses as an intoxication of life, whereas the character of Aschenback (a perfect Dirk Bogarde) in Mann’s Morte a Venezia [Death in Venice] (1971) condenses this passion as the decline of the artist in the sublimity of Mahler’s music against the background of a Venice considered— completely figuratively, in its dense, profound moods—in a double profile as the soul’s resting place and the perversion of innocence. Perhaps also because of his theatrical encounter with Tennessee Williams’ America, Visconti thus proves himself, both in cinema and in the theater, which, as we shall see, continues to adopt trademark European nihilism and radical social critique. Yet the brutal American epic standing alone in the 20th century traversed the ingenious stage manipulation of Orson Welles’s films (Citizen Kane 1941). Yet Welles, author of the radio masterpiece War of the Worlds, when measured by, in a sort of ideal prequel compared to Kane’s story, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), from Tarckington’s novel, he completely surpasses the original in a most exceptional way: he filmically constructs the exemplary affair of an American family from the dominant class, in the homeland of contemporary capitalism, making clever use of double melodrama as well as of revolutionary technical expedients. It is a double melodrama, with the repeated sorrow of two

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generations’ failed loves, in which time is broken down into a sort of tricky game of Chinese boxes, and the falsification of the estranging performance continues to underlie the film, ironic even in the bizarre closing credits, done as the inviting self-presentation of the actors. Two other singular exemplars of the meeting and merging of poetics— each naturally reliant upon details and distinct tools of expression—are Ridley Scott’s “science-fiction” work, Blade Runner (1982), by Philip K. Dick, and Fellini’s adaptation of the longer, and so to speak, Rabelaisian Latin novel Satyricon (1968) by Petronius Arbiter. In Blade Runner, the invention of the futuristic, baroque metropolis—with its nocturnal rain, its omnipresent blinding lights, the verticality of buildings continually assaulted by the traffic of low futuristic vehicles that clog the skies more than the streets—is the actual visual story through which the film translates the nightmare of the life that awaits us. And that nightmare is an integral part of the figurative allegory of Dick’s artificial creatures, which paradoxically become humanized precisely through the miracle of cinema, and precisely by the way they manifest themselves in all their laboriously artificial bearing. Yet Satyricon is also a figuratively obsessive work, smug and elegantly odd in its excesses, in correspondence with Petronius’s story. The ancient world is brought to life, totally gratuitous yet significant and eloquent, through the effectiveness of the parable about the ephemerality of the present age, expressing only the pleasure and cynical depravation that seem to rule with dark mirth today as much as in imperial ancient Rome. Again Visconti pushed even himself further with moderate manipulation of the literary situation, naturally following its particular melodramatic parameters. This is what happens with his first film, Ossessione (1943), taken from the “hard-boiled” American novel from the thirties, The Postman Always Rings Twice. The story’s rootless protagonist finds himself roaming the desolate California landscape during the era of the Great Depression. Though not lost, he wanders with no particular destination beneath the formless skies of the Bassa Padana, during the early years of a war—the Fascist war—of which, in the squalor of fascist Italy, there is no clearly discernable trace, except perhaps in the unspoken element of an arid land deprived of values. The obsession and sensuality, dark and silent, that covertly ignite between him and the pleasant, young woman he meets by chance at a roadside inn, lead him to transgression and crime, although not in a modern, unbiased context like America’s, but in the decaying condition of moral opacity that marks the rough Italian province. The moral condemnation that emerges as the loss of the soul is not suggested by the sanctions of severe formal law, but rather in virtue of

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an ineluctable destiny accentuated by the tragic testimony of a landscape that is also desperately lifeless: the banks of a disorienting river, which on an icy dawn morning irredeemably embraces the protagonist’s inescapable suffering and solitude. Later, with La terra trema (1948), inspired by Verga’s renowned novel I Malavoglia [The House by the Medlar Tree], the combination of the choice to use Sicilian dialect, the Gramscian filter against the tendency of Verghian conservatism, and a consistent soundtrack that turns the affairs of struggling fishermen into epic; as one can see, they shuffle the cards of the original, in the aesthetically productive belief that it is worthwhile to revisit the 19th century text and capture its objective truth, even beyond the profound differences between the text and the screenplay that its mature perspective on southern reality indicates. Literary inspiration somehow becomes even more mature and open in Visconti’s work Rocco e i suoi fratelli [Rocco and His Brothers] (1960). Indeed, even here the proposed social critique is evident, investing “boom” Italy and immigration from the South with an impressive work force, but the condition of anthropological transformation and moral degradation that awaited a family, after centuries of backwardness and hardships, transplanted in search of a new life into the Milan of those years, is suggested by inescapable conflicts, not just through references to the literary texts of a unique contemporary writer/poet like Giovanni Testori, but also in the adaptation of figures, themes and storylines of the great Dostoyevsky of The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot. In the tragic sequences of violence and desperation that confer incisive visibility on an exemplary period drama, the director’s Marxism encounters and interprets the sense of mystery in its own way, full of innocence and human disgrace that, through the Testori-Dostoyevsky pairing, gives the drama an original vital force, almost catholically expressing and contaminating it. Like Visconti, Welles, indirectly involved in the art of the stage in his own way, cinematically measured up to the theater in successes of exceptional relevance: at least two outstanding filmic Shakespearian productions, Macbeth (1948) and Othello (1952). One could say that, for Welles, these two tragedies become almost reinventions in the spirit just as much as in the effectiveness of the letter. At least in the “barbaric” Macbeth, rather than hiding the artificiality of the set, he exposes it through contrasting lighting (though obviously also through other means) and restores the original text’s atmosphere of blood and horror, with an appropriate use of critical distance. In Othello, the performance of Welles himself, in the role of the protagonist, is far from any stylization, ardent and sanguine in his mesmerizing, warm tone.

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Examples of laudable appropriation of the original poetic and unforeseeable displacement into cinematic images also happen, in their own way, with works like Amenàbar’s The Others (2001), which inventively echoes the perfect, moderate Gothic impulse and atmosphere of James’ The Turn of the Screw, and Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1991). Particularly in the latter, his last film, the American director had the guts to contextualize Schnitzler’s work in contemporary New York (recreated in the studio) with a necessarily updated, and thus penetrating, vision of the ambiguous presence of the irrational in the existential and almost biological dimension of the postmodern individual. An individual who has been rendered, by the obscure destiny of all, increasingly strange to himself, starting with his most remote self. A director like Francis Ford Coppola knows how to approach extraordinary cinematic readings, both through the contemporary literary phenomenon of the best-seller as well as through confirmed masterpieces. Indeed, in The Godfather trilogy (1972, 1974, and 1990) he brings new life to the emotion of the classical epic with the ruthless, melancholy saga of an emblematic American mafia family. In Apocalypse Now (1979-1990), and due to his literary-cinematic hyper-mannerism, he convokes the Conrad of Heart of Darkness, as well as Eliot and Nietzsche, on the Mekong river retraced back in time, as the Vietnam War rages, evoking the horrific fascination of irredeemable emptiness, magnificently played by the mournful, intense figure of Marlon Brando. A concrete cinematic reading of literary texts, which involves the intense appropriation of the author’s situation and atmosphere in the specifically filmic medium—almost a transmutation into a second nature without losing the former—is captured in Polansky’s cinema as well as in Wenders’s. Polansky, in The Tenant (1976) takes on the Kafkaesque mannerism of Roland Topor in the apparent linearity of the quotidian: but he does so by charging it with a suspense which is, at the same time, present in the daring camera techniques and the elliptical horror, which at this point has become the set syntax of his style—concisely and felicitously put to the test, not only in his young Polish works but also in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and also, with gentle wickedness, in Dance of the Vampires (1967). In Death and the Maiden (1994), Polansky crosses the geometrical structure and the notes of Schubert’s eponymous “quartetto d’archi” with a text (by Ariel Dorfman) apt for chamber theater, to produce the claustrophobic effects of intense psychological cruelty, as the relief of the inhuman tortures suffered by a woman who happens to go through—although she manages to save herself—the dramatic adventure of the “desaparecidos”. Films like Chinatown (1974), and Frantic (1988),

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assimilate the ironic drollness as well as the reserved emotions of classic literature and cinema noir with analogous effects, while in Tess (1979), the director works masterfully, following in the footsteps of the renowned nihilist Victorian melodrama. An analogous operation occurs particularly in the case of Marco Bellocchio’s film Il gabbiano [The Seagull] (1977, from Chekov), (though in this case the “medium” is more television than film). The screenplay and the transposition from the Russian landscape to the Venetian countryside, lead to an interiorization of the story, in whose settings a melancholy, heart-wrenching chiaroscuro and the affectionate gaze of a nature in black and white work to intensify the operation of symbolization of the drama, on the wavelength of a poetics of the absurd, echoing, in its figural grammar, the system of theatrical signs advanced by the particular content of the “pièce”. Finally, an impassioned literary education is captured in the cinematic poetic of Wim Wenders: a passion that, despite its frank skepticism towards the unlikelihood of the canonical structure of a story’s resistance to the test of linguistic and ideological wear, fatally imprisons it (Kings of the Road, 1975). In Wenders’ films, the fundamental theme of the voyage is almost always marked by an extremely perceptive eye and accompanied by a narrator, and therefore the authors—the source texts—slip away unnoticed, in a discourse where the circular dynamic of “stop and go” becomes one with the internal world, without being excluded from the intense semantics of the visual images. Significantly, then, in Wrong Move (1975), Wenders’ most well-done work, inspired by Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, a miller’s young son, Wilhelm embarks upon a voyage of self-discovery to the South of Germany in order to become a writer. His trip, however, is both real and false at the same time: the people and things he encounters on the way, are only material for his writing, which itself takes place in solitude. They bump into him, not unexpectedly, but only as select opportunities re-evoked in reference to the protagonist’s self: in a word, reality captured in service to its sublimation. Thus, we see the vanity of a voyage that does not reveal but confirms, and if anything reveals a vocation that Wilhelm imposes upon himself out of boredom, as well as an illusory escape from the unsolvable problem of existential silence that fate seems to have forced upon him. Consequently, in Wrong Move, as in Wenders’ other films, one could say that the theme of escape from repetitive daily tedium (his father’s house) is interpreted as a trip without a destination. In fact, in the end, the voyage turns out to be only an inconclusive, Nietzschean cognitive experiment that has not moved anything or any fate from its point of departure. It is in this light

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that the director reads the literary text he had originally turned to for the story. Despite the modernizing adaptation in the direction of his character, Wenders renders him as a placeless vagabond that could have been come from the pen of a 20th century writer, such as Herman Hesse, rather than as a positive Romantic hero. Yet his profound distance from the world allows him to use the filmic medium for a phenomenology of perception that draws on that type of visionary metaphysics used by Peter Handke, a contemporary writer with whom he often shows affinity. 3. With this German director we have come to—and not for the first time—the realm of cinema as re-invention and of literature as a soul exorcized from the practice of uninterrupted internal acrobatics from a necessarily filmic point of view: the films of Bresson and the artists of the “nouvelle vague”, Bergman and Woody Allen, Antonioni and Kieslowski, first, and the radical manipulation of the surrealists and the poets of the screen later, fearlessly take this path. Thus we can say that, in French cinema, Alain Resnais’ exceptional film Last Year at Marienbad (1961) (from the screenplay by Alain RobbeGrillet, primary exponent of the “nouveau roman”) occupies a place of its own in French cinema due to its exceedingly close relationship to literature. Yet in Bresson’s and Truffaut’s films, and generally in directors of the “nouvelle vague”, the screenwriting takes on the same tight dexterity of writing “tout court” and of literary thought that seem to underlie it. At this point, then, the eye of the cinema dictates the images, movement, and dramatic action (as well as the dialogue, though not exclusively or primarily); it is as if an innate literary vocation, cultivated in distant times and beyond, were speaking of a literary spirit that lives on through the gaze and that revealed the same aims and intense allusiveness of words, whereas it is iconology and a more adequate mimesis of time that has no need for circumlocution or reflection. In an entirely different context, Woody Allen’s cinema as well as the Finnish Kaurismäki’s also demonstrate these characteristics: here cinema is precisely re-invention, in which one would have to struggle to discern its literary origin, yet which, if not an actual source, corresponds to the inspirational nature of which one glimpses the fluidly mixed point of view on the world and the stories that these directors create. Visibly parallel to this is the literary path of the great master, Bergman; but if metaphor confidently and moderately controls the expressive style of his films, and analogy dictates the musical scores he is capable of producing, starting with his many outspoken literary and theatrical works and his talent as a writer, metaphor and analogy feed off one another in the

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dramatic symphony that gives sense to his realistic yet metaphysical authorial aims. In Eastern European cinema, Kieslowski, Tarkovsky, and Sokurov are on the same wavelength, in terms of mixing either realism and intricate ethical abstraction (Kieslowski), highly intense spirituality and visionariness (Tarkovsky), or formal rigor at the limits of tolerability and inexhaustible humanistic passion (Sokurov). A director, then, that translates an underlying passion for literature, that is, without his general poetics necessarily corresponding to the content or the form of that passion, is Michelangelo Antonioni. His literary impulses remain determinant, though latent—aside from the film Le amiche [The Girlfriends] (1955), by Pavese—as masterpieces like Il grido (1957), L’avventura (1960), Blow Up (1966), and Professione: reporter [The Passenger] (1974) show in comparison with their contemporaries, rather than with the occasional literary contributions from this Ferrarese director. Nothing is more filmic than these works, and yet their expressivity, completely elaborated through an original figurative syntax, does not prove to be, upon closer examination, alien to a literary type of imaginary. Landscape, movement, and chiaroscuro contrast are, in fact, played out on the tightrope of an existential search that is the voice of the soul and, at the same time, the sound of even more profound lyrical evocations. Paradoxically, Antonioni’s originally almost documentary vocation is capable of the above—though in an entirely different sort of formal successes, showing itself to be more than capable of analogous results—a vocation which also proves itself to be extremely effective in its own particular cultural sphere, a solidly rooted legacy in the tradition of cinema and the arts of the 20th century—namely, surrealism. The talent of authors like, Marco Ferreri and Pedro Almodóvar, for example, find between satire and melodrama, the right way to escape translinguistic mediation— almost by syncopation, losing none of the capital accumulated from literary interests, putting them to work in something entirely different: the original realm of intellectual provocation. Thus, the best works of surrealism (such as Ferreri’s La grande abbuffata 1973, which is marked by a raw erotic existentialism, and Almodóvar’s All About My Mother 1999, which is drawn from the richness of a deep romantic vein), are sustained by an extremism of intentions that the filmicity always manages to let flow, without any kind of literary reflection, with an engrossing product with the right pace and an effective message. Behind all this lies the ungraspable, intense expressive adventure of Luis Buñuel, who, as is well-known, adapts each story to his ingenious cinematic re-invention, making all of them penetrating, even the most apodeictic.

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Speaking of surrealist cinema, it may not seem out of place to refer to another typology of film production, which could not be more different or distant when considered in terms of the geographical and cultural parameters of comparison—what one could, with some concision, call the best of Asian film production, in which the language of the dream—hence the surrealist reference—finds itself particularly at ease. Let us take as examples four exemplary directors, even if they are just as removed in time as they are in space: the Japanese Akira Kurosawa, the Iranian Kiarostami, the Chinese Wong Kar Wai, and the South Korean Kim KiDuk. Cinema as counterpart of the real, and on the whole as subtle, fascinating, oneirical expression defines their filmographies, though differentiated in their respective expressive universes, on the basis of which age-old literary tradition acts as an implied amalgam of extraordinary imaginative sophistication. On the other hand, in particular cultural climate of the Western world there is also the surrealism of “auteurs” like David Lynch and Lars Von Triers, which is especially disturbing and obsessive in its own way. But returning to Buñuel’s influence on cinema in the second half of the 20th century (and in passing, one might recall his cinematic transposition of Wuthering Heights 1953), we naturally come to a remarkable example of real manipulation of more or less flexible literary material: the manipulation practiced by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Post-neorealist settings, exaggerated narrative dimensions a la Buñuel, and Godardian estrangement can be found especially in Pasolini’s exceptional early period, from Accattone (1961), to Il vangelo [The Gospel According to St. Matthew] (1964), from Ricotta in Ro.Go.Pa.G. (1963), to Uccellacci e uccellini [The Hawks and the Sparrows] (1966), as well as in his major masterpiece Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma [Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom] (1975). With Pasolini, however, manipulation of novelesque poetics passes as refined mannerist parameters, almost inevitably decomposing and recomposing in forms that draw, in an oxymoronically absolute way, on the specific filmic medium, yet remaining within the framework of the originals. In fact, Accattone, Mamma Roma, and Uccellacci e uccellini are, in their dramatizations, not at all alien to the plurilingualism and sentimental-populist expressionism found in Pasolini’s earlier poetry, from the short pieces of Le ceneri di Gramsci [Gramsci’s Ashes], and from the period of Ragazzi di vita [The Ragazzi], Una vita violenta [A Violent Life], and the short story collection Alì dagli occhi azzurri [Ali Blue-Eyes]: except to assume the tragically contradictory semblances of the now threatening, now vulnerable imagery of cinematic works, which the other language reassumes in the meta-language that the

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author himself sought to define in all his irrevocable power and semiotic originality, time and time again, through important theoretical pieces. The poet, actor, and director can likewise be said to act simultaneously in filmic experimentation as deconstruction, as seen in the Salentinian Carmelo Bene. Here the classics (from Shakespeare to the 20th century) mediate a radical manipulation intended to productively betray them in an act of parodic figuration that extends to the roots of the cinematic art, and attempts to renew them by killing literature in the spirit of baroque nihilism and sensuous Catholic splendor. The insistent reworking and manipulation of film is also the destruction and self-destruction of the set, Nostra Signora dei Turchi [Our Lady of the Turks] (1968), and all chronological sense is eliminated in order to attain a spare temporality, Capricci (1969). The claustrophobic, visceral atmosphere of Don Giovanni (1970), leads to the extreme form of Bene’s audio-visual obsession in the lights and colors of his Salomè (1972), with his particular shooting techniques and use of sound that both pokes fun at and celebrates Oscar Wilde’s text. The innovative director thus closes his career with another creatively deconstructive project, the parodic masterpiece Un Amleto di meno [One Hamlet Less] (1973), (between Shakespeare and Laforgue), as well as the production of Otello [Othello] (1979-2002) for RAI. As one can see, literature is kept in check by ruthless extravagance and intentional aesthetic abuse. Thus we come to the different expressive realm of the Englishman Peter Greenaway, a painter on film (as he has defined himself on several occasions) who draws inspiration not only from unconventional masters of classical and contemporary figurative art, but also from literary mythology and writers like Borges, Calvino, Perec, as well as from theatrical and religious texts of the great traditions. Greenaway gradually transforms the decomposition of the fragile structures of objects and plots into a true symbolic and allusive collage for a cinema of ideas and spontaneous fantasy, active in an intentional process of the decay of the real, even in works with but minimal literary material (from the 1982 The Draughtsman’s Contract to the 1989 The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover), though he utilized a similarly composed measure in the symphony of Prospero’s Books (1991) (also taken from Shakespeare). But productive, amazing poetic manipulation, though executed without any apparent fanfare, especially happens with the director Theodoros Angelopoulos. It is with The Travelling Players (1975), that Angelopoulos’ cinema becomes especially astute and richly successful, consisting of a complex weaving of levels of expression through the

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combination of myth, tragedy, the folktale, the family chronicle with the cyclicality of historical events (from the most distant past through the 20th century): it is thus that the latent, myriad literary sources reveal an inspiration that harks back to the superbly incomparable ancientness of the Greek myths. Because of this, they confer power and vigor to the dramatic and resistant New Greek Cinema of the era of the dictatorship. The ingenious orchestration of sequence shots and evocative long shots is, however, the most distinct form in his manipulation of the filmic material (which applies to both Alexander the Great 1980, and The Suspended Step of the Stork 1991). But it is Ulysses’ Gaze (1995), that refers, with originality and effectiveness, to one of the most archetypal and constant myths in all of literature. In this film, there is a concreteness of analysis that draws on the endless pain of the fierce, discontented Balkans of today. If it is true that the Sarajevo of snipers and the casual murder of hundreds of citizens and passersby in the streets, the Sarajevo of destruction and bombs so unexpected in the heart of Europe, constitutes the final scenario of the tragedy of a people thus called upon to represent the more universal tragedy of an unredeemed humanity, it is also true that the ancient, lush landscape which has hosted the Slavs from the South and other victims of ethnic cleansing from that area for centuries, appears in Ulysses’ Gaze as poignant as ever and, at the same time, alive in its timeless, aching beauty. Melancholy bourgeois interiors alternate with exteriors of great expressive value, while the music, whether classical or popular, and the occasional long silences that accompany it, simultaneously produces engagement and critical distance from its intense emotional effects. These effects, however, are accentuated by the non-naturalistic progress of the narration, which develops through baroque figures of reiteration and repetition or an oppressive slowness, as well as through realistic/autobiographical references, or rather through the occasional flashes of lyricism the condition of human misery can evoke. In this regard, the at once troubling and moving representation of the failure of the socialist utopia proves to be of enormous semantic value in the emblematic sequence of the group alongside the riverbank awaiting the passage of the dismantled, enormous marble bust of Lenin which, transported on a sort of barge, glides through the waters as a symbol of infinite regret and the un-rhetorical emotions of a people without a future. Yet the “gaze” of the mythical Greek hero, emblematic of the voyage and the quest, becomes lost, thereby distancing the film from its optimistic, more remote literary connotations, as in the film’s final scene, enveloped in a fog thick with fears and dangers,

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marking this improbable time expressed through the poeticism in this work and the spectator’s overall emotional response. In conclusion, all this confirms, for these “auteurs” of manipulation, that the liberatory lesson of the most classic of the classics, the Russian Eisenstein, might still be valuable: not incidentally, in fact, he advocated the betrayal of literature over fidelity to it, and in following the secret etymology of sensory perception, he knew how to handle the epic and the dramatic at the same time, without completely erasing—in a felicitous contradiction—the reasons for linguistic inspiration, which he, not erroneously, considered irreparably xenomorphic within the context of the ungraspable continuity of precious caesurae. Translated by Jamie Richards

Works Cited AA.VV. 1994. La pelle e l’anima. Intorno alla Nouvelle Vague. Florence: La casa Usher. —. 2002. Scrivere con gli occhi. Lo sceneggiatore come cineasta. Il cinema di Suso Cecchi D’Amico. Alessandria: Falsopiano. Abruzzese, Alberto, and Achille Pisanti. 1983. Letteratura e cinema. In Letteratura italiana, vol. 2, 807—836. Turin: Einaudi. Abruzzese, Alberto. 2001. Cinema e romanzo: dal visibile al sensibile. In Il romanzo, vol. 1, ed. Franco Moretti, 775—801. Turin: Einaudi. Antonioni, Michelangelo. 1994. Fare un film è per me vivere. Scritti sul cinema. Venice: Marsilio. Aprà, Adriano. 2005. Stelle a Strisce. Viaggio nel cinema Usa dal muto agli anni ’60. Alessandria: Falsopiano. Aristarco, Guido. 1971. Storia delle teoriche del film. Turin: Einaudi. Arnheim, Rudolph.1983. Film come arte. Milan: Feltrinelli. Barthes, Roland. 1994. Sul cinema. Genoa: Il Melangolo. —. 1985. L’ovvio e l’ottuso. Turin: Einaudi. Bettetini, Gianfranco. 1968. Cinema: lingua e scrittura. Milan: Bompiani. Bluestone, George. 1968. Novels into film. Berkley: University of California Press. Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. 2003. Cinema come arte. Teoria e prassi del film. Milan: Il Castoro. Brunetta, Gian Piero. 1976. Letteratura e cinema. Bologna: Zanichelli. Campari, Roberto. 1983. Il racconto del film. Generi, personaggi, immagini. Bari: Laterza.

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Casetti, Francesco. 1993. Teorie del cinema (1945-1990). Milan: Bompiani. Cavalluzzi, Raffaele. 2005. Cinema e letteratura. Bari: B. A. Graphis. Cattini, Alberto. 1979. Luis Buñuel. Milan: Il Castoro. Chiarini, Luigi. 1962. Arte e tecnica del film. Bari: Laterza. Cohen, Keith. 1982. Cinema e narrativa: le dinamiche di scambio. Turin: ERI. Costa, Antonio. 1993. Immagini di un’immagine. Cinema e letteratura. Turin: UTET. Deleuze, Gilles. 1983. Cinéma. Paris: Edition de Minuit. Ejzenstejn, Sergej M. 1993. Stili di regia. Narrazione e messa in scena: Leskov, Dumas, Zola, Dostoevskij, Gogol. Ed. Pietro Montani and Alberto Cioni. Venice: Marsilio. —. 1986. La forma cinematografica. Turin: Einaudi. Frasca, Giampiero. 2001. Road movie. Immaginario, generi, struttura e forma del cinema americano on the road. Turin: UTET. Gaudreault, André. 1988. Du littéraire au filmique. Paris: Klinksieck. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1962. Ritorno alla realtà fisica. Milan: Il Saggiatore. Kraiski, Giorgio, ed. 1979. I formalisti russi nel cinema. Milan: Garzanti. La Polla, Franco. 1986. Sogno e realtà americana nel cinema di Hollywood. Bari: Laterza. McFarlaine, Brian. 1996. Novel to film. An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Metz, Christian. 1995. La significazione nel cinema. Milan: Bompiani. —. 1980. Cinema e psicanalisi. Il significante immaginario. Venice: Marsilio. Muscio, Giuliana. 1993. Scrivere il film. Sceneggiature e sceneggiatori nella storia del cinema. Rome: Dino Audino. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 1972. Empirismo eretico. Milan: Garzanti. Pesce, Sara, ed. 2001. Imitazioni della vita. Recco-Genoa: Le Mani. Ricoeur, Paul. 1986. Tempo e racconto. Milan: Jaca Book. Sabouraud, Frédérich. 2007. L’adattamento cinematografico. Turin: Lindau. Segre, Cesare. 1985. Avviamento all’analisi del testo letterario. Turin: Einaudi. Selvaggi, Caterina. 2007. Lo sguardo multiplo. Milan: Franco Angeli. Tarkovskij, Andrej. 1988. Scolpire il tempo. Milan: Ubu Libri. Tinazzi, Giorgio. 2007. La scrittura e lo sguardo. Venice: Marsilio. Truffaut, François. 1988. Il piacere degli occhi. Venice: Marsilio.

VADETECUM: A MANIFESTO OF INTER-MEDIA RE-CREATION CARLO TESTA, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

I. From Imitatio to Separatism For many happy centuries, humanity (at least that puny fraction of it which was in the habit of reading and writing books, instead of concerning itself with weapons, horses, court life and hunting-dogs) lived quite at ease with the idea that philosophers, writers and, in general, “poets” (i.e., literally, creators) from the past had something useful to teach, to show, to tell them. That something, it was then assumed, would be beneficial for the artists of the present to take into account as a pre-existing model, if only to deviate from it, at times unwittingly and at times less so, in a new context. That something, it was then assumed, was precisely what would allow creators living in the present—often called, or perceived to be, “the Moderns”—to mature their own author-ity in creative dialogism with the author-ity enjoyed by creators who had lived in the past—often called, or perceived to be, “the Ancients.” Thus it was that before, let us say, 1895, for many happy centuries literate humanity smoothly coexisted with the notion of imitatio: Virgil “imitated” Homer, then Dante “imitated” Virgil, calling him “sweet pedagogue” (Purg. XII: 3) and “sweetest father” (Purg. XXX: 50) into the bargain. Medieval authors “imitated” each other, and their sources “in the books,” without the slightest compunction. Until … until, at the end of the nineteenth century—I suggested 1895 as a symbolic, though clearly conventional date for reasons obvious to anyone working in, or anywhere near, the area of film studies—a dramatic discontinuity occurred. Science, the philosophy of science, philosophy überhaupt, literature, painting, sculpture, music … all were subverted from the bottom up in the major epistemic shift by which the incoming twentieth century shunted its predecessors aside; at that time, men (men: males, specifically) who could fly on sputtering canvas airplanes suddenly felt entitled to look down upon

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the generations of their ancestors who had not been so blessed. Cinema was added to the existing arts, though only tentatively at first. The avantgardes—Dadaism, Cubism, Futurism—swept the board. The Russian-born movement soon described as “Formalism” endeavored to bring a scientific method even to that most impressionistic of sciences, the until then improperly called Literaturwissenschaft, and set out to impart to literary studies the same precision already long practiced by (for example) historical linguistics, or textual philology. Thus it was that the earlier habit of insouciance and ethical tolerance in the general, and generally admitted, inter-media and intra-media practice of imitatio suddenly gave way to a culture of paranoia: a culture, that is, of suspicious separatism. To the avant-gardes and to the Futurists, from Marinetti to Maiakovskii, sullying one’s hands with remnants from the past was the lowest abomination to which a human being could stoop.1 Likewise, to the new “scientists of literature,” the Formalists, there was no way of accepting the notion of effective transferability between diverse art forms that clearly did not share a common code. It is in this cultural environment that we need to assess the early stages of the scholarly argument about the literature-and-cinema relationship. Cinema, the youngest Muse, was in its early years heavily dependent on her elder sisters—literature in particular—to acquire a cachet of respectability that, for social, historical and technological circumstances, it objectively could not yet afford on its own. While such dependence has now been, in successive stages, fully overcome, one can understand why in the first quarter of the twentieth century a trend toward what could be called a “separatist reaction” might have attracted some as appropriate. It even appears logical that the intensity of that overcompensatory impulse should have been proportional to the perceived undesirability of cinema’s initial dependent status. Let us first examine a typical early anti-imitatio argument that was put forward by Viktor Shklovsky in 1923: “Konechno, mozhno dat’ cheloveku trombon i skazat’ sygraite na nëm Kazanskii sobor“, no èto budet ili

1

Among the very few cases of serious twentieth-century imitatio—aside from Joyce’s Ulysses—we must count Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers, Lotte in Weimar, and above all Doktor Faustus (all discussed with sagacity in Genette 2000). It is of course no coincidence if the renovation of (serious) twentiethcentury art is precisely the impossible task to accomplish which Adrian Leverkühn believes himself, in Doktor Faustus, to have contracted a pact with none other than the devil …

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shutka ili nevezhestvo”2 [Sure, one can give a man a trombone and then tell him: “Now play the Kazan cathedral on this”; but that will be either jest or ignorance] (Shklovskii 1923, 21). Given that the Kazan cathedral is, as its name suggests, a cathedral, it is obvious that this is a pretty tough test for trombones to pass. What film theorist can seriously expect cinema to participate in such contests—indeed, who can even enter it into them with a straight face? It is odd to witness the attempt by Shklovsky to sign up the subject of his own trade, cinema, into a competition which it cannot but lose. First seeking an impossible challenge, and then sporting with pride the prize of one’s defeat: what a strange course of action to choose.3 It took about thirty years for the legacy of the Russian Formalists to reach France. When this eventually happened, the Hexagone punctually went through what could be called Avatar Two in the state of denial I just described about the ongoing film-and-literature affair. At the time—the late 40s, the first half of the 50s—the self-styled, obviously very selfimportant Cinéma de qualité was offering a pretty conventional repertoire to the French public, drowning it in well-made but, all told, predictable screen versions of the classics of French nineteenth-century literature; and this, mostly as an escapist manner to look away from the burning issue of the age, the colonial wars in Vietnam and then in Algeria.4 In that context, the term “adaptation” was quickly canonized as the official, obviously derogatory bogeyman by a wave of younger practitioners of Film Theory; and it is in just such a form that it appears in Avatar Two’s Sekundärliteratur to which I now wish to turn. In Esthétique et psychologie du cinema (1963-65), Jean Mitry took issue with “adaptation” to pronounce it no less than an utter impossibility. The idea recurs in his book just mentioned no fewer than three times (adapted to two in the English translation): “[E]xaminant ici le strict problème de l’adaptation, nous allons voir qu’il n’en fut rien parce que la chose est impossible” (Mitry 1963, 346) [Adaptations of the great works of fiction never in fact happened, for the simple reason that it is just not possible] (Mitry 1997, 326; emphasis added). Furthermore,

2

I have been unable to locate an English edition of this text; an Italian translation was published in Shklovskii 1987 (quote ibi on p. 115). All translations are mine, unless stated otherwise. 3 For fuller details on Shklovskii’s essay, see Testa 2001. 4 For perhaps the most effective contextualization of the circumstances surrounding the cinema of the French Fourth Republic (1945-1958), see Prédal 1991, 78—81.

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Vadetecum: A Manifesto of Inter-Media Re-creation Choisissant d’exprimer la même chose que le romancier, l’adaptateur trahira nécessairement la forme romanesque; et s’il entend la respecter il devra se contenter de mettre en images un monde signifié au lieu de créer ses propres significations. Le transfert est impossible (Mitry 1963, 352; emphasis in the original, not retained in the English translation). If he chooses to express the same thing as the novelist, the adapter is bound to betray the form of the novel; and if his intention is to respect the form, then he is forced merely to put into pictures a world which is already signified, instead of creating his own significations. Direct transposition is an impossibility (Mitry 1997, 331; emphasis restored).

Everything obviously hinges on that term, “direct,” which Mitry understands in a narrow, mechanical sense. (A lot more on this later, anyway). That said, a certain merit is in fact contained in Mitry’s position. It is on this merit that I wish to focus now, drawing my readers’ attention to a passage in which the critic is at his comparative best: Il est pratiquement impossible, par exemple, d’exprimer avec des mots ce que Léonard exprime avec des formes et des couleurs dans La Vierge aux rochers. […] A la limite, on peut cerner avec des mots les significations qui sont propres [à ce tableau], mais on ne pourra jamais signifier la même chose, créer des significations identiques, obtenir par quelque expression verbale le “contenu latent” qui le caractérise (Mitry 1963, 347; emphasis in the original). It is practically speaking impossible to express in words what Leonardo da Vinci expresses with form and color in The Virgin of the Rocks. […] At a stretch, it is even possible to capture in words the significations which it constructs—but not to signify the same thing, to create identical significations, achieve with a verbal expression the latent content making it what it is (Mitry 1997, 327; emphasis in the original).

True enough—but so biased as to become irrelevant. It is not too difficult to flunk cinematic “adaptation” by putting it to a suitably impregnable test; clearly, just picking our analogy with a little greater generosity would have allowed us to obtain substantially less disastrous results. Instead of an ekphrasis, Painting > Literature interaction, let us for example postulate an inverse sequence, Literature > Painting. Would anyone be willing to question that Leonardo successfully “adapted” the Gospel’s narrative about Jesus’s Last Supper with his Ultima cena in Milan’s church of Santa Maria delle Grazie?5 5

For more details on (and fuller quotes from) Mitry’s argument, see Testa 2001.

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Starting with the Sixties and Seventies, the ideas of Mitry and likeminded French nouvelle vague critics became established in North America. At this point, a full-fledged Avatar Three of the separatist paradigm took hold in the New World: a reincarnation eventually attested to by the translation into English, in 1997, of Mitry’s Esthétique et psychologie du cinema from which I have been quoting. As a consequence, this fact established for good the term adaptation in North America, duplicating, some eighty years after the fact, Shklovskii’s initial, dogmatic parting of the waters. (I regret not being in a position to comment here on the reasons why the North American continent has anyway always privileged formalism over historicism as an analytical tool). In the latest twist to an already very twisted story, some well-meaning but possibly too optimistic scholars of high Culture with a capital C (Naremore 2000; Stam 2000, 54—76) have recently begun to attempt rejuvenating the aged word “adaptation.” On the other hand, some other theorists (Hutcheon 2006) have embraced with sincere gusto the term “adaptation” as is—but in so doing have opted to annex it mostly to the area of cultural studies with a small-case c. Thus, to make matters even less satisfactory, the term “adaptation” now circulates with different, competing nuances attached to it.

Intermezzo. On F… : Or, The Demon of Analogy At this point it seems advisable for me to engage in a brief intermezzo about that most lethal consequence of the obsession with the concept of “adaptation.” I am alluding to a very bad word that starts with F, Fidelity: a word which—unbelievable, but sadly true—is on occasion still uttered in the relevant (?) literature. Granted, today hardly anyone who mentions F does so in order to argue that it be upheld as a criterion for aesthetic evaluation. However, it is clear that even allowing for deviations from F still assumes that deviations from F are a subject worth pondering. This clearly constrains the debate within the bounds of what seem to me singularly sterile parameters. As I have already said, I view this particular take as separatist: authors and auteurs are thereby separated from the respective contexts, synchronic and diachronic, in which they operate, or operated; and the form of their works is separated from its dialogical linkages, synchronic and diachronic, to other works in the same series. But here I would like to go one step further and maintain that, technicalities aside, the notion of textual “fidelity” deserves to be definitively rejected because it is part and parcel of an ideologically

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repressive, prescriptive approach to inter-media dialogism (and, for that matter, also to dialogism of the intra-media sort). Indeed, the choice of this conjugal analogy in an area that, to my knowledge, has little to do with life companionship appears to me to strike such an improbably clumsy note that I am—slightly—surprised it has not been laughed out of our libraries a long time ago. Evidently, a sufficiently large segment of the group of individuals involved in the film-and-literature issue was (perhaps is?) so consumed by what Mallarmé calls le démon de l’analogie that they found (find?) this particular analogy to be an adequate vehicle to metaphorize their own mental processes.6 It is, of course, true and inevitable that all persons only use the metaphors they understand … or rather, the metaphors they have put themselves in a position to understand.

II. From Adaptation to Re-creation: Èizenshtein and Desire While the West was focusing on embalming Shklovskii’s FuturistFormalist calembours into a mummy more sacred, and more enduring, than Lenin’s, in Shklovskii’s home country film theory took on new life; and it took on new life in the person, and thanks to the efforts of, Sergei Èizenshtein, whose usage of the incomparably more fruitful term recreation I shall now consider. Èizenshtein explicitly mentions re-creation, extolling it as “magnificent,” and contrasting it to the repulsiveness of forgery, in his essay “Diderot Wrote About Cinema.”7 The point of this essay is to oppose to each other uncreative, debased imitation of pre-existing forms with an original appropriation of them that incorporates features inspired

6

Of course, mere analogy is not an acceptable tool for scientific proof. The reference is to Stéphane Mallarmé’s petit poème en prose “Le démon de l’analogie”: Mallarmé 1945, 272—73; “The Demon of Analogy”: Mallarmé 1956, 2—4 and 1994, 93—94. 7 Having been unable to locate either the original or an English version of Èizenshtein’s article, I am quoting from the Italian translation: La contraffazione (poddelka) è ripugnante. La ri-costruzione (vossozdanie) è magnifica. [Forgery (poddelka) is repulsive. Re-creation (vossozdanie) is magnificent] (Eizenstejn 1993, 385, ibidem bibliographical information on the original, posthumous edition). Ri-costruzione (“re-construction”) is, as it turns out, an incorrect Italian translation.

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by a changed environment and adequate to it. For the first he uses the term poddelka (“forgery”), for the second vossozdanie (“re-creation”).8 After some elaboration on the history of Soviet cinema, and an allusion to failed attempts by Soviet directors to imitate passively certain external features of American cinema, Èizenshtein provides a fitting parallel to illustrate his pedagogical point: Pust’ napominaniem o zaimstvovanii printsipa […] ostanetsia v vashei pamiati aèroplan. […] Nastoiashchaia pobeda cheloveka nad vozdukhom, nesomnenno, nachalas’ s togo momenta, kogda ot podrazhaniia vneshnei forme letaiushchikh proobrazov aèroplana—ptits—on pereshël k osoznaniiu formy kak zakona stroeniia iavlenii. Drugimi slovami, popytki cheloveka vzletet’ byli obrecheny na neudachu do tekh por, poka na pervom meste u nego ostavalos’ vneshnee podrazhanie poletu ptits. […] [Obraz ètot] pomozhet vam zapomnit’, chto ”zaimstvovannye“ èlementy budut zhivitel’no vkhodit’ v sostav vashego izobreteniia lish’ togda, kogda oni budut ne sluchainymi fragmentami drugogo chastnogo sluchaia, a rezul’tatom mudrogo osvoeniia printsipa, umestno primenennogo v drugikh ili analogichnykh usloviiakh (Èizenshtein 1966, 649—650; emphasis added). As an image of the borrowing of a principle […] I would like you to keep in mind the airplane. […] The true victory of human beings against air undoubtedly began at the time when they moved from the imitation of the external form of the airplane’s flying prototypes—the birds—to the acknowledgement of form as a phenomenon-structuring law. In other words, human beings’ attempts to fly were doomed to failure for as long as the most important thing seemed to them to be the imitation of the external shape of birds’ flight. […] [This image] will help you remember that the elements you “borrow” will become part and parcel of your own invention, in a vital manner, only when they will cease to be fragments haphazardly drawn from another particular case, and become the result of the mature acquisition of a principle, appropriately applied in different or analogous circumstances.9

In a nutshell: as a governing principle, direct imitation is out; on the other hand, the intelligent reproduction of equivalent functions is in. To 8

For a closer discussion of the two terms supra, and re-creation infra, see Testa 2002b. 9 To be precise, Èizenshtein’s Selected Works in English include a Torito in which the theoretical part is dropped and only the autobiographical one is retained. On the other hand, a generally accurate full version in Italian appears in Eizenstejn 1993, 330 and 332.

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put the issue in Èizenshtein’s more general terms, we should look at form “as a phenomenon-structuring law.” Èizenshtein’s eloquent argument should satisfactorily account for the reasons why I am adamant that we discard altogether the word “adaptation” and consistently replace it with re-creation. As a sole corollary I would add that, when concepts and practices previously shaped by a given cultural-historical mold are re-created in a different medium and in a different century, they are also to be re-cast into another mold appropriate to a socially, technologically and ideologically altogether different moment. Despite Èizenshtein’s well-deserved fame in Anglophone countries, this particular contribution of his never took hold here, and instead, “adaptation” carried the day—indeed, not just the day but the entire last third of the twentieth century. Only very recently, by way of the growing influence of Bakhtinian dialogism on Anglophone scholarship, have concepts such as “transcoding” and “transcultural adaptation” begun to take hold in our cultural environment. But, however diminished, battered and wounded, the term adaptation still lives on as a term, and continues to influence mental processes and attitudes.10 Philosophically speaking, the problem with “adaptation” is that the term contains an in-built ontological prejudice, postulating that each cultural arte-fact A is an accomplished, exhaustive, self-contained entity located in a particular spot of the spatio-temporal continuum. On that basis, the recurrence of some similar impulses (ideas, techniques … whether or not materialized and objectified in the fictions we call “character” and “plot”) in another entity located elsewhere in the spatiotemporal continuum will—within the parameters of the “adaptation” concept—automatically be assumed to eke out a derivative, secondary existence as A’. This is a critical fate on whose misery one need elaborate no further, in view of the imitation-averse, dogmatic “pro-originality” obsession we have absorbed in the wake of twentieth-century avantgardes. (I am, of course, only talking about Culture with a capital C; for its part the cultural industry, with a small c, notoriously begs to differ from our opinion-making critics, as it opts to focus less on the case of its own letters than on the size of its profits). In contrast, re-creation—as its name attempts to suggest—puts every artefact on an ontological foot of equality. In the universe of re-creation, I would argue, there is no A > A’ transfer process, where A and A’ would 10

Our library shelves still illustrate the status quo ante by, among many, the following commonly available titles: Cartmell and Whelehan 1999; Griffith 1997; McFarlane 1996; Naremore 2000; Orr and Nicholson 1992.

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be separated by a historical and/or inter-media watershed. On this view, given any experience epsilon, there are merely different artistic expressions of that epsilon which approximate such experience by manifesting themselves as, say, artefacts M and N (or M, N, … , Z). The poietic barrier does not separate M from N; it rises instead between epsilon, on the one hand, and M and N (or M, N, … , Z) on the other. All representations labeled M through Z are on the same side of the barrier. Thomas Mann’s and Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice can offer us a pertinent practical example of these processes. Aschenbach’s Venetian story is only apparently about Polish boys and Italian cholera; rather, it is about the “forces of the abyss” synthesized by the Eleusinian mysteries and exorcised by Mann’s self-controlled rhythmical prose in Der Tod in Venedig—and then evoked again by Mahler’s music in Visconti’s Morte a Venezia. Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig uses the conventions proper to a millennial literary tradition, steeped in forms made familiar to us by ancient Greece; but these, too, are in turn mere epiphenomenal conventions, intended to approximate the apeirôn, the Infinite. If I were a film director, in these circumstances I would feel that seeking one-on-one cinematic equivalents for words of literature would be the least of my concerns. I would feel, indeed, that this pseudo-problem would distract me from the one true problem at hand: how to establish contact with the dark world to express which images and words are equally inadequate. Mann’s quasi-hexameters are themselves “re-creations” of something inexpressible, something that radically defies representation: desire in its pure, uncontrollable state. Thus, pace literal-minded philologists bent on endowing literature with an ontological (as opposed to merely chronological) priority it does not have, re-created cinema is not there/here to “adapt” a pre-existing literary text already perfectly accomplished in all its levels of expressiveness. At the same time, pace concerned theorists who in querying the small fry of “adaptation” omit to question (i.e., passively accept) the much larger ontological prejudice just mentioned, in this sense at least literature and cinema are not on opposite sides of a watershed: they are on the same one.11 My readers might at this point fear that, having discarded the “adaptation” concept and a fortiori its corollary, the F-word “fidelity,” I am now favoring a galaxy of indifferent re-creative alternatives: a model in which, so to speak, “M-to-Z, anything goes.” In fact, nothing is more remote from my intentions, as I shall explain in a moment. 11

For a close reading of the Mann-Visconti relation, see Testa 2002b, chapter 8.

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III. Complexity Theorized: Dostoevskii, Nietzsche, Lotman, Visconti A one-dimensional, teleological conceptual frame such as the one imposed by “ad-apt-ation” encourages us to think in terms of univocal hierarchies: for every given range of transcodificatory options, A > X, only one X will prove the most “apt.” (For example, X = A’, but not A’’ or A’’’). “Re-creation,” in contrast, encourages us to think in multidimensional terms, with different alternatives (M, N, … , Z) exploring different variants of epsilon, and thus avoiding all attempts to create a mechanical formula by which to “crank out” a fixed value for the unknown quantity that we wish to determine. Let us reason e contrario, and assume that the re-creation of literature in cinema were an exact science, with operations characterized by a set of properties allowing for univocal equations of the type 2 x 2 = 4, in turn susceptible to undergo univocal reversibility as 4 : 2 = 2. Would such a type of exact convertibility between texts be desirable? Probably no one ever rejected this hypothesis more forcefully than the narrator of Dostoevskii’s Notes from Underground, who protests that, as a human being endowed with free volition, he wishes to be able to claim that 2 x 2 = (for example) 5. For something as banal and mechanically reproducible as 2 x 2 = 4, he caustically argues, no human beings are needed: any machine can produce that result. Èkh, gospoda, kakaia uzh tut svoia volia budet, kogda delo dokhodit do tablichki i do arifmetiki, kogda budet odno tol’ko dvazhdy dva chetyre v khodu? Dvazhdy dva i bez moei voli chetyre budet. Takaia li svoia volia byvaet! (1:8) […] Ia soglasen, chto dvazhdy dva chetyre—prevoskhodnaia veshch’; no esli uzhe vsë khvalit’, to i dvazhdy dva piat’—premilaia inogda veshchitsa (1:9) (Dostoevskii 1973, 117—19). What will have become of our wills, [gentlemen,] when everything is graphs and arithmetic, and nothing is valid but two [times] two make four? Two [times] two will make four without any will of mine! Is that what one’s own will means? (1:8) […] I agree that two [times] two make four is an excellent thing; but to give everything its due, two [times] two make five is also [at times] a very fine [little] thing (1:9) (Dostoyevsky 1972, 39—41).

Anyway, the cinematic re-creation of literature is nowhere near the neat simplicity of 2 x 2 = 4 and 4 : 2 = 2. The conversion between the literary system and that of cinema is characterized by a complexity of the

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highest level. In this case there simply cannot be any question of creating an algorithm that establishes the bi-univocal equivalences necessary for us to move from Text A to Text A’ and then back from Text A’ to the original reading in Text A. This observation can be found in the theories of the semiotician Iurii M. Lotman, who stresses that artistic creation occurs precisely in the differential space that is not covered by “perfect” (i.e., perfectly reversible, perfectly and mechanically predictable) translatability.12 The link to the Man from Underground’s “2 x 2 does not equal 4” argument shines through in Lotman with perfect clarity: certain interpretive operations might well be perfect—but if any machine can carry them out, what kind of truth are they liable to reveal to us as human beings? None, evidently. It is not the single, ideal language of sterile perfection that human beings understand, but their many creatively imperfect humane ones. In terms of cinematic practice, on this view the task of film directors is not to aim for a target that is anyway going to elude them, but to act in such a way that the new equation they are setting up holds according to its own internal logic. In some sense, for masters of cinema who re-create works produced by masters of literature it is necessary to ensure that 2 x 2 = 5; or, more precisely, that 5 is the only solution consistent with “2 x 2 =” as defined on the basis of the operations and properties of their own new, re-created universes.13 The best way for M, N, … , Z to re-create epsilon, then, is for each of them to find their own desired target value: 5, 3, or any other number (even 4, for that matter, if so desired) that creates a self-consistent system. To “follow” epsilon appropriately, in other words, each of its re-creations M, N, …, Z must “take its own path.” Having thus re-formulated the nature of the problem at hand, we must then recognize that the precept central to the idea of inter-media recreation amounts not to an a priori, prescriptive vademecum, but to an a posteriori, descriptive vadetecum—as argued in Nietzsche’s sardonic, yet serious rhymes to just that effect: Vademecum—Vadetecum. Es lockt dich meine Art und Sprach, Du folgest mir, du gehst mir nach? 12

See Lotman 1983. I have been unable to locate an English version of this essay; an Italian translation appears in Lotman 1985 (ref. on p. 121). 13 A particularly synthetic, masterly criticism of the “2 x 2 = 4” (perfect convertibility) argument can be found in Lotman 1992, 12—16, esp. 13.

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Vadetecum: A Manifesto of Inter-Media Re-creation Geh nur dir selbst treulich nach:— So folgst du mir—gemach! gemach! (Nietzsche 1973, 26) Attracted by my style and talk You’d follow, in my footsteps walk? Follow yourself unswervingly, So—careful!—shall you follow me (Nietzsche 1964, 14).

Herein, of course, lies the rub. Does the definitive death of “adaptation” amount to a relief, or to a catastrophe? In much the same way as the “death of God” announced by Nietzsche, which depending on individual attitudes can be experienced, and thus function, as either an opportunity or as a bereavement, so too the liberation of the inter-media (for our purposes, literature-to-cinema) re-creation process from the crushing weight of the old parameters of “adaptation” can lead to problems as worrisome as those suffered under the old epistemic regime. In particular, because the re-creation principle puts on artistic artifacts the onus of more freedom than adaptation used to, its responsibility in endorsing as artistically desirable this or that particular specimen of intermedia transcodification becomes correspondingly greater. Hence the legitimate question: does re-creation retain any evaluative, any critical standard (in the literal sense of the word); or does it replace the absurd strictures of old with a nocturnal free-for-all in which all re-creations are grey? To answer this question cogently, I would like to return to Lotman’s semiotics and re-visit with him the argument that cultural systems, while similar to other systems of communication, are nonetheless set apart from the latter by the fact that they are characterized by higher levels of complexity, and indeed, strive for the highest possible level of complexity. Although seemingly paradoxical, it corresponds to the structure of the human mind that in a chain such as: message coded by road signs—text in a natural language—creation by poetic talent it should be precisely the last text mentioned, which is the one endowed with the greatest cultural value, to be least easily transmitted. Hence Lotman’s conclusion: sometimes, “it seems important to do whatever is necessary to do not in the simplest way, but in the most complex one.”14 14 “

(U)siliia po adekvatnosti vzaimoponimaniia sostavliaiut lish’ odnu iz dvukh glavnykh tendentsii kommunikativnogo mekhanizma kul’tury. Nariadu so stremleniem k unifikatsii kodov i maksimal’nomu oblegcheniiu vzaimoponimaniia mezhdu A1 i A2, v mekhanizme kul’tury rabotaiut i priamo protivopolozhnye tendentsii. […] Po kakim-to prichinam okazyvaetsia vazhnym delat’ to, chto neobkhodimo sdelat’, ne samym prostym, a naibolee slozhnym obrazom.” [Efforts

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Luchino Visconti, who knew little about the then new science of semiotics, but is generally credited (in Italy at least) with having known quite a bit about cinema—and literature, and literature-and-cinema— tersely argued as much when, in an interview he originally gave in French, he described in a nutshell his own ars poetica. Visconti’s first concern is to reject as self-delusion the Futurist / avant-garde obsession with “originality.” He then proceeds to identify complexity as the quality on which artistic creation is based. Not without a certain ambition, he declares: Lire un livre est déjà œuvre créatrice. La fidélité n’est pas manque de pouvoir créateur. Quoi que l’on fasse, on s’appuie toujours sur un mythe ou une histoire plus ou moins déjà racontée. Qu’importe, sinon le nouveau regard? Mais quand je choisis une œuvre littéraire précise, c’est pour lui donner une nouvelle dimension, ou plutôt une dimension qu’elle possède implicitement, mais que seul un regard “autre” peut lui donner. Ce regard que réclame justement le créateur et qui, lui-même, est créateur. Mon ambition est d’aller dans le sens le plus difficile qu’aurait choisi l’auteur, le sens secret qu’il souhaitait être décelé par ses lecteurs les plus attentifs. Il me semble que cela aussi est faire œuvre d’auteur (Visconti 1984, 107—108). Whatever one does, one always builds upon a myth or a story that has more or less already been told. The only thing that matters is the new gaze cast on it. When I choose a specific literary work, it is so that I can give it a new dimension; or rather, a dimension which it already possesses implicitly, but which only “another” gaze is able to give it—precisely the gaze called for by the creator, a gaze that is creative in and of itself. My purpose is to strive for the most difficult reading among those that the author would have chosen, the secret meaning which he wished his most attentive readers to uncover. It seems to me that doing this, too, means being an author.15

aimed at adequate mutual comprehension (i.e., at what could be called an “algebraic convertibility” of texts) are but one of the two main tendencies in the communicative mechanism of culture. Alongside the striving to unify codes and to maximize the simplification of mutual understanding between A1 and A2, in the mechanism of culture exactly opposite tendencies are at work as well. (…) Somehow it seems important to do whatever is necessary to do not in the simplest way, but in the most complex one] (Lotman 1983, 98 and 100; emphasis in the original). An Italian translation can be found in Lotman 1985, 118—120. For more details see Testa 2001. 15 For a contextual analysis of Visconti’s views on re-creation, see the conclusion to Testa 2002b.

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Neither Lotman nor Visconti make an additional point, which follows logically from the above and in my view has the greatest practical implications: it is vital that transcodifications aim for maximum complexity in their target system (say, in the terms I have been using, system Z) because it is certain that, during the process of inter-media recreation from (say) system M to Z, vast amounts of information will be lost in the first place. If the information lost is not replaced by new information apt to function in the new system, then Z will indeed be a lot poorer … a lot more inept than M. With this last comment, have we now in some way gone full circle and ended up returning, after a long circuit, to Mitry’s old intolerance against transcodification? I hope it is clear that this is in no way my desire. More simply, the re-creation theory I am proposing implies refining the more productive part of Mitry’s skepticism.

IV. Complexity Tested: Re-Creation Between Quantity and Quality On that very subject, I must admit up front that sceptics are not unreasonable when they make points somehow compatible with Fellini’s splendidly separatist peroration: Il cinema è un’arte autonoma che non ha bisogno di trasposizioni su un piano che, nel migliore dei casi, sarà sempre e soltanto illustrativo. Ogni opera d’arte vive nella dimensione in cui è stata concepita e nella quale si è espressa. Che cosa si prende da un libro? Delle situazioni. Ma le situazioni, di per sé, non hanno alcun significato. E’ il sentimento con cui queste vengono espresse che conta, la fantasia, l’atmosfera, la luce: in definitiva l’interpretazione di quei fatti. Ora l’interpretazione letteraria di quei fatti non ha nulla a che fare con l’interpretazione cinematografica di quegli stessi fatti. Sono due modi di esprimersi completamente diversi (Fellini 1983, 23—24). Film is an autonomous art form which has no need of transpositions to a level which, in the best of cases, will always and forever be mere illustration. Each work of art thrives in the dimension which conceived it and through which it is expressed. What can one get from a book? Plot. But plot itself has no significance. It is the feeling which is expressed that matters, the imagination, atmosphere, illumination, in sum, the interpretation. Literary interpretation of events has nothing to do with cinematic interpretation of those same events. They are two completely different methods of expression (Fellini 1988, 28).

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But, in light of the re-creation theory I am proposing here, on closer inspection Federico Fellini only proves half right. The charge of semiotic impoverishment (“Plot”) to which “FeFe” alludes is only real when the recreation at hand is an impoverishing, i.e., an incompetent one. On the other hand, that same charge cannot be made to stick when a filmmaker substitutes the complexity of one literary artistic system with a cinematic system of comparable, or even higher, artistic complexity. An obvious example of a case of EQUIVALENT COMPLEXITY is—to stay with Fellini—the phantasmagoric re-creation of Kafka’s Amerika (a.k.a. The Man who Disappeared) inside the Cinecittà kermesse carried out in his own Intervista (1987);16 or—to return to Visconti—Rocco and His Brothers (1960), which displays the genius of yoking Dostoevskii, Thomas Mann, Verga and Testori to the humble plight of immigrants and prostitutes interacting in Milan’s melting pot. GREATER COMPLEXITY (Mitry, where are you?) has instead been achieved when certain films proved able to transform pre-existing onedimensional literary works into vast “frescoes”—of course, this is an analogy …—functioning on many more different levels (historical, social, political, psychological …) than their respective “pre-texts” could ever hope to do. This was the well-known case of, for example, De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948, vs. Bartolini’s), and Visconti’s own Senso (1954, vs. Camillo Boito’s). It was also the case, I would argue, for Visconti’s The Leopard (1963, vs. Tomasi di Lampedusa’s). Whereas Visconti’s Leopard superposes individual, social and political tragedies, and a bit of comedy to boot, thus creating a multi-layered narrative structure of almost cosmic resonance, Tomasi’s sole concern seems to lie with the fate of one aristocratic Sicilian family; and his narrative voice—the occasional allusion to Baudelaire notwithstanding—is almost exclusively interested in the cheap retrospective jeu de massacre of showing that most people in humanity’s past were not as rational as they could and should have been for their own good. For my final point I will remain with Visconti, so as to “control for the director’s talent,” to use the language of the social sciences—i.e., so as not to compare a racing horse to a jackass. Finally, certain films do indeed offer us unsatisfactory re-creations from literature, when they replace their earlier counterpart’s complex, polysemic systems with systems of LESSER COMPLEXITY. This was the sad case when, in re-creating such an elusive, between-the-lines text as Camus’s L’Étranger (1942), Visconti was contractually forced by Camus’s widow to restrain himself, in making Lo 16

For a detailed analysis of the Kafka-Fellini theme, see chapter 2 of Testa 2002b.

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straniero (1967), to the well-known suicidal formula “The plot, all the plot, and nothing but the plot.” To use Camus’s favorite term in a demeaned sense, this was an obviously absurd demand which promised disaster, and promptly delivered it both in critical terms and at the box office (Testa 2002a, 54—56). Examples in each of these three categories could clearly be accumulated ad lib. But the argument best summarized as complexification vs. simplification is fruitful, I believe, because it allows us to inject a substantial amount of objectivity into the way we conceptualize the recreation process previously known as “adaptation.” Yes, there may be a continuum, as Hutcheon astutely postulates (Hutcheon 2006, 171—172) stretching from the “maximum fidelity”—ouch!—of literary translation, at one end, to Lord-of-the-Rings Barbie dolls, which according to Hutcheon are located at the opposite end of “maximum infidelity.” (As Jean-Paul Sartre would have observed: so young and already so p…!). But, Lord of the Dolls aside, the point that it would be most important to make—and that Hutcheon does not make, or does not want to make—is that from a semiotic viewpoint such a scale must be conceived as reflecting a quality-indexed, decreasing level of complexity. On such a scale (to re-use one of Hutcheon’s best examples), “Shakespeare’s adaptation of Arthur Brooke’s versification of Matteo Bandello’s adaptation of Luigi da Porto’s version of Masuccio Salernitano’s story of two very young, star-crossed Italian lovers” from Verona (Hutcheon 2006, 177) ought to stand on the highest rung, in the company of the works of Homer, Virgil and Dante (plus, of course, Fellini and Visconti); while, on that same scale, pieces such as Star Trek coffee mugs deserve to receive an attention proportionate to the less exalted position earned them by the smaller amount of information they convey. In my eyes there is a substantial hiatus in value between a work of art that contains a certain amount, however defined, of truth with beauty, and a mass-produced object that contains, at most, a watery brewage. In broaching quantity (of information), am I then also addressing, by proxy as it were, the issue of (artistic) quality? I certainly am. Monuments of culture—i.e., great works of art—can live forever on into the future (much to the Futurists’ aggravation …) because of their un-repeatable quality.17 Art perennially thrives in the space of Dostoevskii’s “2 x 2 = 5”; 17 A fundamental conceptual distinction, developed by Walter Benjamin, needs to be made between the twentieth-century material reproducibility (Reproduzierbarkeit) of the exterior form of a work of art, and the enduring non-duplicability on command of its essence: that is to say, art’s “surplus” that brings it grat-uitously from “2 x 2” to 5. Kunst is Gunst, Gnade: grace produces it, not reason—and

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its extra unit is the value added, ex nihilo, by Monna Lisa’s “inexplicable” smile. On the other hand, cultural monuments of the caliber of Star Trek coffee mugs are most likely to disappear very quickly from an already tragically overburdened human recollection. And this is justly so: our mind’s finite resources ought to be reserved for what truly commands humanity’s enduring attention. Not all candidates for inter-media recreation are liable to pass the demanding, but all-important test of historic memory.

Works Cited Cartmell, Deborah, and Imelda Whelehan, ed. 1999. Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text. London: Routledge. Dostoevskii, Fëdor Mikhailovich. 1973. Zapiski iz podpol’ia. In Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh. Vol. 5: Povesti i rasskazy 18621866. Igrok. Leningrad: Nauka. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. 1972. Notes from Underground. The Double. Trans. Jessie Coulson. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Èizenshtein, Sergei. 1966. Izbrannye proizvedeniia v shesti tomakh. Vol. 4. Moscow: Iskusstvo. Eizenstejn, Sergej M. 1993. Stili di regia. Narrazione e messa in scena: Leskov, Dumas, Zola, Dostoevskij, Gogol’. Ed. Pietro Montani and Alberto Cioni. Venice: Marsilio. Fellini, Federico. 1988. Comments on Film. Ed. Giovanni Grazzini. Trans. Joseph Henry. Fresno, Ca.: The Press at California State University Fresno. —. 1983. Intervista sul cinema. Ed. Giovanni Grazzini. Bari: Laterza. Genette, Gérard. 2000. Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré. Paris: Seuil Points. Griffith, James. 1997. Adaptations as Imitations: Films From Novels. Newark, DE.: University of Delaware Press. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Lotman, Iurii M. 1992. Kul’tura i vzryv. Moscow: Gnosis. Lotman, Jurij M. 1985. La semiosfera. L’asimmetria e il dialogo nelle strutture pensanti. Ed. Simonetta Salvestroni. Venice: Marsilio. technology least of all. (Art = a highly complex system of a special, nonduplicable-on-command kind of information, worthy of memory because of the ethico-aesthetic utility that, when properly trained, humanity can derive from it).

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Lotman, Yu. M. 1983. “K postroeniiu teorii vzaimodeistviia kul’tur (Semioticheskii aspekt).” Trudy po romano-germanskoi filologii. 92— 113. Mallarmé, Stéphane. 1994. Collected Poems. Trans. Henry Weinfield. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. —. 1956. Selected Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters. Trans. Bradford Cook. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. —. 1945. Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry. Paris: Gallimard Pléiade. McFarlane, Brian. 1996. Novel To Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mitry, Jean. 1997. The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema. Trans. Christopher King. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. —. 1963. Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma. Vol. 1. Paris: Éditions universitaires. Naremore, James. 2000. Film Adaptation. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1973. Idyllen aus Messina. Fröhliche Wissenschaft. Nachgelassene Fragmente Frühjahr 1881-Sommer 1882. Vol. 5:2 of Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. —. 1964 [1909-11]. The Joyful Wisdom. Trans. Thomas Common, Paul V. Cohn and Maude D. Petre. Vol. 10. In Complete Works by Friedrich Nietzsche. Ed. Oscar Levy. New York: Russell and Russell. Orr, John, and Colin Nicholson, ed. 1992. Cinema and Fiction: New Modes of Adapting, 1950-1990. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Prédal, René. 1991. Le cinéma français depuis 1945. Paris: Nathan Université. Shklovskii, Viktor. 1987. Letteratura e cinema. In I formalisti russi nel cinema. Ed. Giorgio Kraiski. Milan: Garzanti. Shklovskii, Viktor. 1923. Literatura i kinematograf. Berlin: Russkoe universal’noe izdatel’stvo. Stam, Robert. 2000. Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation. In Film Adaptation. Ed. James Naremore, 38—53. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Testa, Carlo. 2002a. Italian Cinema and Modern European Literatures. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Praeger. —. 2002b. Masters of Two Arts: Re-creation of European Literatures in Italian Cinema. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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—. 2001. Dalla letteratura al cinema: adattamento o ri-creazione? Bianco & Nero 62, 1: 37—51. Visconti, Luchino. 1984. Luchino Visconti cinéaste. Ed. Alain Sanzio and Paul-Louis Thirard. Paris: Persona.

SECTION 2: FIDELITY

TARCHETTI’S FOSCA AND SCOLA’S PASSIONE D’AMORE: A COMPARISON MARCO ARNAUDO, INDIANA UNIVERSITY, BLOOMINGTON Ettore Scola’s transposition of Igino Ugo Tarchetti’s Fosca into Passione d’amore (1981), suggests a serious reconsideration of the director’s artistic path,1 effecting a radical distancing from his previous political works, such as the documentaristic Vorrei che volo (1980) and, notably, from the macro genre of Italian-style comedy that he courted in the sixties and seventies. This phase of Scola’s career culminated one year before Passione d’amore with La terrazza,2 a portrait of intellectuals in crisis “per delusione da rivoluzioni mancate o per rimorsi da complicità a misfatti culturali” [from their disappointments about un-realized revolutions or regrets about their complicity in cultural failings] (Tassone 1

Appropriately, Passione d’amore was described as “apparentemente anomalo ed eccentrico se messo in rapporto con tutta la produzione di Scola” [apparently anomalous and eccentric with respect to the entirety of Scola’s productions] and yet his detailed attention to the psychological workings expresses “il nucleo poetico di Scola, sempre attento a non esaurire lo sguardo sulla superficie cosiddetta oggettiva” [a poetic nucleus characteristic of Scola’s work, always careful not to over-utilize the so-called objective and superficial view] (Bíspuri 2006, 258). As Scola himself remarks in an interview: “Ho l’impressione di aver fatto un unico film: gli ho messo qualche volta dei vestiti del Settecento, o, come in Passione d’amore, vestiti di inizio secolo, ma il film, più o meno, è sempre lo stesso, i temi sono quelli” [I feel as if I had made a single film: sometimes I might have clothed it in eighteenth century garb, or, as in Passione d’amore, turn-of-thecentury garb, but the film is more or less the same, and the themes are familiar] ( Marlia 1999, 38). All quotes have been translated by Stefania Sidoli-Stewart unless otherwise noted. 2 “La terrazza segna un punto di svolta nella filmografia di Scola, che si è venuta comunque emancipando, da un decennio, dal modello della commedia attestata su uno stile oscillante tra farsa e grottesco” [La terrazza marks a turning point in Scola’s film career which has now distinguished itself from a decade’s worth of work modelled on a comedic style that oscillates between farce and the grotesque] (Brunetta 1993, 386).

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1979-1980, 319) a film that represents, as proposed by Manuela Gieri, an authentic “testament” to the Italian-style comedy and a metacinematographic manifesto of Scola’s art (Gieri 1995, 195).3 The opposition between La terrazza and Passione d’amore could not be more clear-cut. With Passione d’amore “Scola si lascia definitivamente alle spalle le ambientazioni, il linguaggio e il bestiario umano della commedia” [Scola definitively leaves behind the setting, language, and human bestiary of comedy] (Masi 2006, 75): against said comedy we find a story of love and horror; against contemporary society, the postunification nineteenth-century; against the urban scenery, the forsaken squalor of a nowhere town in the mountains; against a complex and artificial temporal construction, a progressive and linear narrative; against politics, ideology and intellectuality, the uncontrollable irrationality of passion (explicitly rendered by the title which is meaningfully different from Tarchetti’s novel).4 This is the first of Scola’s films to be based on a novel since the era of Commissario Pepe (1969), and therefore also the first project which, after more than a decade of screenplays specifically conceived for film,5 restricts the director—who is eager to remain faithful to the book—to move in and around someone else’s story for the purpose of creating a compromise that harmoniously blends the two narratives.6 3

The chapter entitled “Ettore Scola: A Cinematic and Social Metadiscourse” (157197) reviews Scola’s relationship with Italian comedy. 4 “Il disagio che Scola prova nel frequentare le terrazze romane è qui sobrietà di stile e linguaggio, scavo psicologico autentico, inattesa e felicissima credibilità emotiva. La bruttezza è in natura: nessun alibi sociale, dunque, e nessuna possibile ricetta ideologica” [The unease Scola experiences as he frequents Rome’s Terrazze Romane is expressed here as a sobriety of style and language, a genuine, unexpected, psychological dig, and an effective emotive credibility] (Ellero 1995, 73). Silvestri says “difendiamo volentieri questa Passione d’amore perché Scola ha smesso (a differenza dei suoi coetanei connazionali) di farsi l’esame di coscienza e di spietatamente mettere alla gogna la sua generazione” [we gladly uphold this Passione d’amore because Scola (unlike his Italian contemporaries) has stopped examining his conscience and mercilessly tarring and feathering his generation] (Russo 2002, 93). 5 Or, at most, taken from a play and therefore more “malleable”, as in La panne by Dürrenmatt. 6 Scola himself states in an interview: “bisogna esser[e fedeli] quando si fa un film ispirato a un’opera letteraria. Credo che il massimo della fedeltà sia nel cambiare. Importante è rispettare quello che l’autore voleva trasmettere ai suoi contemporanei, quindi cercare le corrispondenze, la traduzione in un altro linguaggio, di un’altra epoca” [one must be faithful when making a film based on a

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The overall impression is that with Passione d’amore Scola sought to react against the intellectual impasse and the exhaustion of Italian-style comedy, both visible in La terrazza. He is starting over by daring himself to transplant his own recognizable identity to—and create art on—less familiar grounds. With this hypothesis in mind, this paper will investigate the various modes of adaptation that Scola has accomplished with respect to the original text, particularly those through which the director has expressed his own personality, departing from the text—always with subtlety. Sometimes he intentionally alters the written word to then restore its sense and the atmosphere as image; at other times he alters certain details to give the film its own character so as to render it more than a mere translation, a sister to the novel. For the sake of clarity, I have divided the elements of my analysis into three groups: 1) the expressive possibilities and necessary adjustments resulting from the change of medium, from verbal to audiovisual; 2) the infusion of stylistic features that have accompanied the director along the arc of his career, and of which Scola is so fond as to add them to the original story; 3) the modifications of Tarchetti’s text that more profoundly determine the specific identity of Passione d’amore. Obviously, the latter element of point 3 cannot be altogether disconnected from the stylistics of the preceding point (since they both derive from the same artistic stance). On the other hand, the fact that the identity contributes more to the internal coherence of the film than to connecting it to other achievements from the body of Scola’s work, permits us to distinguish two separate elements for expository purposes. As for the first group, the most evident cases in which the director is obliged to make creative choices are those in which the novel presents texts within the text, such as letters and pages from a diary, as frequently occurs in Fosca. Faced with these inserted texts, there are three possibilities for the director: eliminate them entirely, blend them into the film by visually representing their content, or use a voice-over to narrate the text, making it necessary to include new images that fill the screen during the narration. Scola opts for the latter solution, which allows him to maintain the sense of intimacy and the emotive immediacy of the character revealed in the first person. In so doing, Scola translates an obligation inherent to the medium (to maintain a continuous flow of images) into an

literary piece. I think the fullest expression of this lies in the changes themselves. It’s important to respect what the author wanted to convey to his readers at the time by trying to find the equivalents, the translation into another language in a different era] (Bertini 1996, 162).

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artistic possibility such that those “filler” contents actually enrich the complexity of the work. As Giorgio’s voice is heard reading the letter he wrote to Fosca from Milan to break off their incipient relationship, (the text of which is taken from the body of the novel), we watch Fosca anguish as she waits for her beloved to return: tapping nervously at the keys of the piano, wandering around Giorgio’s room, caressing the bed as if searching for some trace of him. With this seemingly elementary device, the director achieves a suggestive inter-weaving of perspectives with a strong tension between the organized, measured, rational and self-justified discourse of Giorgio’s letter (“debbo essere crudele per essere giusto,” [to be just I must be cruel] (Tarchetti 1988, 74) and the deep, visceral suffering that Fosca is experiencing, expressed entirely through her body, and which those words will hardly serve to mitigate. Even the sound transposition of the dialogues permits Scola to develop his characters by playing on the differences in dialect and intonation foreign to Tarchetti’s text. Giorgio’s actor-school diction, devoid of any regional accent, creates a sharp contrast with the markedly Piedmontese accent and dialect segments of the other officers, with the lighter (yet nonetheless recognizable) Piedmontese accent of Fosca’s Italian, and with the Sardinian character’s stammering speech.7 In this way, even at the phonic level, Giorgio’s identity is distinguished from, or “other” than, the characters surrounding him. As for the typical stylistics of Scola’s productions that persevere in Passione d’amore, despite the apparently anomalous nature of the film, the limitations of this paper oblige us to restrict the discussion to only two such examples: the staging of the group meal and the placement of the historical period in the background rather than central to the events described. One of Scola’s favorite devices is to gather various characters around a table (as in La cena) so that they are captured in a thick game of relations 7

“Ciò che negli anni Settanta si evidenzia con maggiore chiarezza, almeno a proposito del cinema di qualità, è il superamento dell’egemonia del romanesco [...]. Il cinema di Ettore Scola si inserisce in questo panorama con emblematica attenzione anche al fenomeno linguistico, ponendosi di fronte allo spettatore come un unico mosaico di varietà regionali per così dire alternative” [What comes through clearly, in the Seventies, at least in quality cinema, is the move beyond the hegemony of Romanesco (…). Ettore Scola’s films take their place in this movement, with emblematic attention to the linguistic phenomenon, among other things, displayed for the viewer as a mosaic of regional, and, so to speak, alternative varieties] (Micheli 1994, 65).

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in which their characteristics are more easily revealed, and where the physical proximity of the actors makes it possible for the director to enfold, in a single image, the rather complex alchemy of glances, gestures, words and hesitations (Nepoti 2002, 197—204). In the novel, it is during Giorgio’s attendance at the colonel’s dining table that he meets and is subsequently forced to interact with Fosca: “io non posso cessare di frequentare la vostra casa…la mia lontananza creerebbe dei sospetti” [I can not cease to visit your home…my absence would raise suspicion] (Tarchetti 1988, 74). Although this situation constitutes the catalyst for the ensuing course of events, the colonel’s table remains relegated to the background, populated by anonymous, faceless figures among whom only the two protagonists, the colonel and the doctor emerge. Scola is instead concerned with adding numerous lunches and dinners to his film that are foreign to the novel, and, more importantly, he establishes a well-defined identity for each guest, punctuated by the doctor’s voice introducing them one by one at the start of the dinner. We have Major Tarasso, a kind of Piedmontese Falstaff, equipped with a plethora of inexhaustible and risqué anecdotes, Captain Rivolti, characterized by a tepid personality that ignites only at the billiard table, Lieutenant Baggi, a veterinarian and food connoisseur who incessantly complains about the lack of proper ingredients. In the film, the doctor is given the curious habit of placing a gold coin8 on the table with the promise of giving it to his fellow guests if they should ever successfully finish an entire meal without once speaking of horses or women. Paradoxically, Scola’s convening of the characters does not create a sense of harmony or conviviality. This forced proximity does not overcome the sense of collective solitude heavily burdened by personality differences, mutual indifference (with the doctor locked in his solipsistic coin game, Giorgio lost in his thoughts, etc.), and the absence of any personal and intellectual exchange, substituted by Tarasso’s monopolizing little stories. Regarding the other recurring element in Scola’s productions and poetics, that is to say, his interest in the micro-story of the characters in relation to the macro-story of the nation, Ennio Bíspuri writes: È un fatto che film come C’eravamo tanto amati o La terrazza o La famiglia o Mario, Maria e Mario, che sono inscritti in modo esplicito all’interno di segmenti storici precisi, non mostrano nulla di quello che effettivamente accade nella società, nulla dei conflitti, talora anche acuti, nulla del ’68, nulla della strage di piazza Fontana a Milano, nulla di “Mani 8

Called a Marengo, an old Italian coin.

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Pulite”, meno che nulla del rapimento e dell’uccisione di Moro, nulla del lento spostamento a destra dell’asse politico italiano. It is a fact that films like C’eravamo tanto amati, La terrazza, La famiglia or Mario, Maria e Mario, which are explicitly inscribed within precise historical segments, reveal nothing about what actually occurred in society, nothing of the conflicts, at times severe, nothing of ‘68, nothing of the tragedy at Piazza Fontana in Milan, nothing of “Mani Pulite,” nothing at all of the kidnapping and killing of Moro, nothing of the slow shift to the right of the Italian political axis (Bíspuri 2006, 98). 9

Bíspuri proceeds to comment on the difference between the original screenplay for C’eravamo tanto amati, enriched by inserts of historical information from the period in question, and the effective realization of the film centered around personal events and circumstances: Non si tratta tuttavia di una negligenza del regista, ma di un preciso e generale punto di vista stilistico, di una scelta estetica ed espressiva che, ancora una volta, è sbilanciata nei confronti della psicologia dei personaggi, delle loro emozioni, dei loro sentimenti e, in una parola, della loro vita privata, che, pur intrecciandosi all’evoluzione della Storia, campeggia sempre in primo piano come il punto di riferimento privilegiato da Scola e dalla sua analisi. It is not, however, a matter of directorial negligence, rather a precise and general stylistic point of view, an aesthetic and expressive choice that is, once again, off balance vis-a-vis the psychology of the characters, their emotions, their sentiments and, in a word, their private lives, which, being also interwoven with historical developments, stand out as the point of reference privileged by Scola and his analysis (Bíspuri 2006, 98).

The importance of this affirmation is all the more evident in a film like Passione d’amore, in which the relationship between individuals and history is not based on the original text but entirely “added” by the director. In Tarchetti’s novel the narration’s entire fictional world revolves around Giorgio’s emotions and obsessions deriving from his relationship with Clara and Fosca. References to Italian history are extremely vague or absent, and one gets the impression that the year 1863, in which the story takes place, is not specifically connected to any socio-political context. It is no wonder that this date appears only in the inscriptions left by two pairs of lovers and in the pages of Giorgio’s diary in which he documents his

9

See also Iaccio 2002, 133—145; De Santi and Vittori 1987, 57—60.

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separation from Clara.10 It is a time measured in affections, governed by the heart and not by politics. Even the militaristic setting of the novel exists in an atmosphere so abstract and rarefied that it verges on the surreal, almost an antecedent to Deserto dei Tartari, or, in any case, an intentionally undefined back-drop against which the young Giorgio’s agitation can occur unopposed. Scola’s film, on the contrary, opens with Giorgio’s remarks on the absurdity of the violent events that brought unification to the peninsula. At the table the men read the newspaper and discuss Garibaldi, the novels of Rovani and the phenomenon of brigandism as the effect of exploitation of the common man by the bosses. The topic of brigandism occurs again, even more significantly, as a recreated dialogue from Fosca. It is the promenade scene, touching in both Fosca and Passione d’amore, in which Giorgio speaks of love, unaware that he is torturing Fosca, and Fosca confesses her desperate love, beseeching him to at least grant her some compassion for her deformity. At the end of the scene the two protagonists join two other characters whose chatter grotesquely contrasts the emotional intensity of the preceding events. Tarchetti writes: In quel momento avevamo raggiunto il colonnello ed il suo amico che si erano fermati alla porta ad aspettarci.

10 “Sopra una fronte di esso, rimasta intatta, erano scritti a matita molti nomi che il tempo aveva in parte cancellati: due righe sole parevano recenti e dicevano: 22 agosto 1863. Giulio e Teresa—amanti e sposi felici” (Tarchetti 1988, 61—62) [On the still intact surface, written in chalk, were many names which time had partly erased. Only two lines seemed recent, and they read: 22 August 1863. Giulio and Teresa—lovers, happily married] (Tarchetti 1994, 52—53); “Sopra uno stipite della porta rilessi le date delle gite che aveva fatto fino allora a Milano, e che aveva avuto cura di scrivervi tutte le volte colla matita. Erano cinque in tutto; vi aggiunsi quest’ultima: Giorgio e Clara, 19 dicembre 1863” (Tarchetti 1988, 142) On a door post I reread the dates of every trip that I had made to Milan thus far and carefully recorded in pencil. There were five in all; to them I added this last one: Giorgio and clara, 19 December 1863] (Tarchetti 1994, 147); “Ecco soltanto ciò che ne scrissi allora nel mio diario: “23 dicembre 1863. Registro questa data e queste memorie due ore prima di ripartire da Milano. Clara mi ha lasciato in questo momento; ho il cuore gonfio di lacrime, e vorrei piangere come un fanciullo” (Tarchetti 1988, 153) [The following constitutes the only entry I made in my diary at the time: 23 December 1863. I record this date and these memories two hours before I again depart from Milan. Clara has just left me; my heart is swollen with tears, and I could weep like a child] (Tarchetti 1994, 160).

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—Sapreste dirmi—mi chiese il colonnello col volto arrossato dalla discussione avuta col suo compagno—se fu De-Fauchée l’inventore delle capsule a secco, o piuttosto se non fu lui che le ha perfezionate? —Egli ne fu l’inventore. —Lo sapete positivamente? —Positivamente. —Al diavolo!—disse il suo amico. —Benissimo!—esclamò il colonnello, fregandosi le mani—sei bottiglie di madera guadagnate! (Tarchetti 1988, 65). At that moment we reached the colonel and his friend, who had stopped at the gate to wait for us. “Would you tell me,” the colonel asked me, his face reddened by the discussion he had had with his companion, “whether De Fauchée was the inventor of the percussion cap, or the man who perfected it?” “He was the inventor.” “Are you positive?” “Positive.” “Blast it!” said his friend. “Very well!” exclaimed the colonel, rubbing his hands together. “I am six bottles of Madeira to the good!” (Tarchetti 1994, 56).

Scola lays out the entire scene with precision, the only difference being that the two characters accompanying Giorgio and Fosca are speaking of politics (“fare una legge contro il brigantaggio è come fare una legge contro la miseria e l’ingiustizia” [creating a law against brigandism is like creating a law against misery and injustice]; the question they are debating concerns the man behind the proposal for a law against brigandism: Senator Pica according to one, the Minister Di Negro according to the other. The historical dimension as a point of reference for understanding the individuality of the characters is profoundly necessary for Scola. If in a film like C’eravamo tanto amati or Una giornata particolare the historical context is left in the background, this does not mean that its role is secondary. This is apparent in the fact that when it is absent, as it is from Fosca, the director is concerned with reconstructing it from nothing. Indeed, it is probably the Risorgimento context of Passione d’amore that confers on Giorgio’s situation a different and further articulated meaning than it has in Fosca. Whereas in the novel the protagonist’s fate is dominated by his predisposition to emotional overwhelm,11 in the film, 11

“Io era nato con passioni eccezionali. Io non avrei mai saputo né amare né odiare a metà; non avrei potuto abbassare i miei affetti fino al livello di quelli degli altri uomini. La natura mi aveva reso ribelle alle misure comuni e alle leggi comuni.

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this same passivity becomes synonymous with the cynicism, political disillusionment, and apathy that often succeed the idealistic fervor of early youth. Giorgio’s initial, doleful speculations on the madness of war, set the stage for his subsequent existential drift, his consolatory self-abandon in his relationship with Clara, followed by his gradual, masochistic, selfflagellating submersion in his relationship with Fosca. On the subject of Giorgio’s steady decline, we may observe one of the mechanisms of adaptation from the above-mentioned third category, thanks to which the specific physiognomy of the film is more fully developed. In the film, Giorgio’s descent into an abyss of desperation and the intensification of Fosca’s passion develop in a more linear and compact manner than occurs in the book. In Fosca, Giorgio’s bipolar personality has the character alternating between contrasting states of mind, a constant see-sawing between excitement and dejection. At the beginning of the novel we find Giorgio in a state of deep depression: Io mi vedeva isterilire, immiserire, deperire. Fosse effetto della malattia, fosse influenza di quel soggiorno triste ed uggioso, io mi era interamente e miseramente trasformato. Una malinconia profonda, una disperanza piena di gelo e di scetticismo si erano impadronite di me. Non sentiva piú alcun rammarico del passato, né alcuna trepidanza dell’avvenire (Tarchetti 1988, 25). I saw myself sterilized, impoverished, wasting away. Whether it was the effect of the illness or the influence of that sad, wearisome sojourn, I was entirely and miserably transformed. A profound melancholy, an icy despair shot through with skepticism took possession of me. I stopped feeling any regret for the past, and any trepidation at the future (Tarchetti 1994, 11).

Subsequently, the beginning of his relationship with Clara transports him to a state of hyper-excitement and actual, physical illness caused by an excess of emotion as opposed to their melancholic absence (as in the film): Essa mi strinse al suo seno, e mi coprí di baci e di lacrime. —Vi amo, vi amo, ma lasciatemi. Fuggii come un demente.

Era dunque giusto che anche le mie passioni avessero cause, modi, svolgimenti, fini eccezionali” (Tarchetti 1988, 21) [I was born with exceptional passions. I could never hate or love in moderation; I could never lower my affections to the level of other men’s. Nature rendered me a rebel against common standards and comon law. It was therefore just that my passions should have exceptional causes, means, developments, ends] (Tarchetti 1994, 7).

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Alla notte fui assalito dalla febbre; ebbi strane visioni, feci dei sogni puerili: vedeva delle farfalle e degli angeli, dei paesi che non aveva mai visto; mia madre, piú giovane di molti anni, piangeva vicino al mio capezzale, ed era vestita di un abito grigio che io l’aveva veduta portare da bambino. Allo indomani era malato (Tarchetti 1988, 32).12 She clasped me to her bosom, and covered me with kisses and tears. “I love you, I love you, but leave me.” I fled like a madman. At night I was attacked by a fever; I experienced strange visions, childish dreams: I saw butterflies and angels, villages I never visited; my mother, many years younger, wept at my bedside. She was clothed in a grey dress that I remember her wearing in my youth. On the following day I fell ill (Tarchetti 1994, 18—19).

Next comes the romance with Clara, the torment of leaving Milan, the bitter-sweetness of long-distance love, the hope of future meetings, the shame and sense of oppression deriving from Fosca’s request. The palette of emotions turns out to be exceedingly variable, and intersected along the way by sudden jolts of humor. An example of this is the way in which Giorgio, despite the mounting sadness of the situation, is able to ignite within himself a puerile enthusiasm during the train ride to Milan: Ho passato sei ore in una specie di dolce rapimento, colla testa fuori dello sportello, coll’anima perduta nella natura. Un viaggio in ferrovia è una corsa attraverso la natura: si provano le stesse vertigini del volare. Dopo che la scienza ha creato questo mezzo di locomozione si può quasi dire che l’uomo ha delle ali. Che bella fantasmagoria di alberi, di fiumi, di case, di paesaggi! Come l’orizzonte pareva girare intorno a me, quasi mi fossi trovato in circolo magico! (Tarchetti 1988, 70—71).

12

Note that even before the events of the novel Giorgio was subject to an emotionally derived illness. “Non parlerò adesso dei dolori che avevano provocata quella mia malattia. Essi appartengono ad un’altra epoca della mia vita; furono il frutto di una passione che, ove non mi fosse inspirata dal piú nobile dei sentimenti, avrebbe coperto di onta il mio passato. Nondimeno quei dolori furono enormi, e se non ebbero il potere di uccidermi, è perché tal potere è spesso negato al dolore” (Tarchetti 1988, 24) [I shall not speak of the sorrows that provoked my illness. They pertain to another epoch of my life; they were the fruit of a passion that, if I had not been inspired by the noblest of sentiments, would cloud my past in disgrace. Nonetheless, my sorrows were enormous, and if they lacked the power to kill me, the reason must be that such power is often denied to sorrow] (Tarchetti 1994, 10—11).

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Tarchetti’s Fosca e Scola’s Passione d’amore: A Comparison I spent six hours in a sort of sweet rapture, my head thrust out the train window, my soul lost in nature. A journey by rail is a race across the landscape: one experiences the sheer giddiness of flight. Since science created this means of locomotion, one can almost say that man has grown wings. What a beautiful phantasmagoria of trees, rivers, houses, meadows: How the horizon seemed to wheel around me, as if I were the center of a magic circle! (Tarchetti 1994, 63—64).

An abrupt change in his state occurs when Clara truncates their affair without warning, in a letter that Giorgio had anxiously opened expecting to find the usual love words. The end of the relationship with Clara has an external cause, namely, her sudden devotion to her husband and son. It is a trauma that acts on the young man’s emotions and not the effect of his own interior journey. I highlight this point now, as I will return to it briefly. In the final chapter, the protagonist’s state of mind is ambiguous to say the least. Giorgio has returned to his home town, where he tries to recover from his infernal experience; a letter from the doctor urges him to sever himself from the past, and Giorgio’s own thoughts lead us to believe that such a detachment is possible, at least in part: Mi sembra talora che tali fatti sieno avvenuti in un’epoca assai remota della mia vita, tale che non può neppure essere circoscritta entro il limite degli anni che ho già vissuto; e sarei tentato di negare fede all’esistenza di questo passato angoscioso, se le traccie che esso ha lasciato nel mio cuore non fossero troppo palesi e troppo profonde (Tarchetti 1988, 182). I sometimes feel that they [these events] occurred in an epoch quite remote from my life, such as could never be circumscribed within the span of years I have already lived; and I would be tempted to disbelieve the existence of my anguished past, if the traces that it left imprinted in my heart were not too evident and too profound (Tarchetti 1994, 194).

The past has left deep scars, but it also appears remote and unreal, like a nightmare from which the sleeper has at least some hope of awakening. The reader is given license to imagine that the highs and lows of Giorgio’s mood, after the end of the novel, could assume a kind of ascendant motion. Giorgio’s inner voyage does not proceed this way in Passione d’amore. The adjustments that Scola makes to Tarchetti’s model are too precise to not be seen as a sign of a deliberate plan, intent on tracing the protagonist’s slow fall from the pinnacle of happiness (to the extent that someone like Giorgio can be happy) to an abyss of moral and emotional devastation.

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To that effect, Scola eliminates all the preparatory phases leading up to Clara’s and Giorgio’s falling in love; he starts directly from the apex of their relationship, from the culmination of their involvement and reciprocated satisfaction. The only light-hearted moment for Giorgio, the scene in which we see him helping a clumsy soldier onto his horse, occurs at the beginning of the film, before his encounter with Fosca. There is also a “positive” aspect to his curiosity about Fosca, whom he imagines to be attractive and which provides him with a distraction from his routine detachment. Scola thereby establishes at one end of the film, a rather acceptable situation in which the protagonist, though disillusioned by historical events, finds consolation in his surrounding micro-reality. Once Fosca enters the scene, however, Giorgio’s situation becomes characterized by an increasingly gloomy atmosphere that contributes to an equally linear, dual development of emotions: on the one hand the subtle and relentless encroachment of Giorgio’s attraction to Fosca (of which he himself is unaware), and on the other hand, the extinguishing of his affair with Clara. The mood swings are reduced to a minimum. Accordingly, the enthusiast’s train ride scene in Fosca is replaced by a brief shot of a fog bank. To a lesser degree, the same goes for the character of Fosca; though she remains a victim of uncontrollable attacks of passion, those fits and contradictions that, in the novel, are visible even in her lucid moments, are softened in the film. When Giorgio returns from his temporary leave during which he has seen Clara, the two protagonists of the novel have the following dialogue: —E vi ritornerete [da Clara]? —Prestissimo. —Se ne avrete licenza. —S’intende. —Ah! ah! —esclamò ella sorridendo— dirò io una parola a mio cugino. Dipenderà tutto da lui. Scommetto che avrete bisogno della opera mia. —Signora! —io dissi vivacemente— non comprendo le intenzioni che vi consigliano a farmi questa offerta, e mi astengo dal rispondervi. —Rifiutereste perfino la mia mediazione? —Non vi avrei creduta capace di offrirmela! (Tarchetti 1988, 77). “Will you return [to Clara]?” “Very soon.” “If you get a leave.” “Of course.” “Ahha!” she exclaimed, smiling. “I shall speak to my cousin about it. It all depends on him. I bet you will need my help.”

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Tarchetti’s Fosca e Scola’s Passione d’amore: A Comparison “Signora!” I said. “I do not understand the intentions that induce you to make me this offer, and I refrain from responding to you.” “Would you even refuse my mediation?” “I do not believe you are capable of offering it to me!” (Tarchetti 1994, 70).

Both the reader and Giorgio understand that Fosca is still in love with him and that she perceives Clara as a rival. She nonetheless proposes to help Giorgio go to Clara. It is a mysterious and unexpected move, (“non comprendo le intenzioni che vi consigliano a farmi questa offerta”). It reveals an inextricable, emotive complexity in which, together with her passionate desire, there is perhaps a masochistic impulse, perhaps an attempt to rid herself of this love by delivering Giorgio to Clara, or perhaps an attempt to conquer his recognition by this overt act of abnegation. In Scola’s version, precisely as we might have expected, this same dialogue is devoid of any internal ambiguity or contradiction. Fosca wants Giorgio all to herself and threatens to take action to keep him far from her rival: —E vi ritornerete [da Clara]? —Prestissimo. —Se ne avrete licenza. —S’intende. —Potrei fargliela negare. Parlerò io a mio cugino. “Will you return [to Clara]?” “Very soon.” “If you get a leave.” “Of course.” “I could see that it is denied. I will, personally, speak to my cousin.”

This deliberately mono-tonal narrative is evenly matched by the rhythm of the editing, “tutto dosato nella lentezza di numerosi piani-sequenza, con rari passaggi bruschi e stacchi nervosi” [doled out slowly in numerous long takes with only occasional, abrupt segments or nervous breaks] (De Santi and Vittori 1987, 146). Returning to Giorgio, we observe the way the exchange of roles between Clara and Fosca over the course of the film stems from an entirely emotive, internal motion that develops slowly and gradually. In the film Clara decides to leave Giorgio simply because she understands that their relationship is at an end concomittantly with Fosca’s growing importance in his life. In the book, as alluded to earlier, Giorgio’s emotional conversion is instead much quicker, sudden, and externally

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motivated, almost as if it were a fierce act of spite towards Clara, or some new demonstration of his semi-pathological moodiness. Similarly, in the duel episode, Tarchetti plays on Giorgio’s outbursts and explosive reversals: Giorgio is tense at first, ready to fight although “in attesa di qualche cosa di strano, di terribile, come di essere fulminato” (Tarchetti 1988, 180) [waiting for something strange, something terrible to occur, as if I were about to be struck by lightning] (Tarchetti 1994, 191), after exchanging a few blows of the sabre with the colonel, he becomes “più che stanco, annoiato” (Tarchetti 1988, 180) [more than tired—bored,] (Tarchetti 1994, 191), but his animosity towards his adversary “[lo] scosse istintivamente dalla [sua] apatia” (Tarchetti 1988, 180—81) [instinctively roused him from apathy] (Tarchetti 1994, 192),; when they finally move on to pistols, indolence gets the better of him once again, causing him to fire his shot without aiming. Tarchetti’s Giorgio, despite everything, does not go to the duel with the intention to punish himself, but rather he is under the effects of an inner tension between a violent and aggressive rage and a vague desire to abandon himself to the emptiness of death. In Scola’s film, in which continuity prevails, the duel scene is presented as the logical and coherent succession to the interior permutations that occurred up to this point. Proceeding along the lines of his moral decline, Giorgio attends the duel by inertia and behaves as if he were participating in some sort of ritualistic suicide, indifferently awaiting his adversary’s feeble shot and then firing randomly, not only without aiming, but without even looking. The result of this action also differs from the novel in a way that contributes to the total downfall into which Scola has thrown his Giorgio. In Tarchetti’s duel it seems that Giorgio has killed the colonel, but in the final chapter we discover that he only wounded him in the shoulder. In the film, this retraction is missing entirely and the viewer of Passione d’amore must therefore presume that the colonel was wounded fatally by Giorgio. The ulterior guilt of a homicide is thereby added to the protagonist’s already heavy burden. As a dignified conclusion to the compact, descending path in Passione d’amore, there is one final substitution to Tarchetti’s story (which instead contains at least a glimmer of hope) with a scene purposely designed for the film: a dazed Giorgio sits in a tavern telling his story to a dwarf—a figure that traditionally represents otherness and transgression, often acting as a mirror that distorts and degrades the hero’s image. As far back as Chrétien de Troyes’ Lancelot, being mocked by a dwarf was the worst

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kind of humiliation for a knight.13 Analogously, for an ex-soldier of the Risorgimento, the derisive laugh of the dwarf that closes the film, sanctions the protagonist’s collapse to the vilest, basest level of existence, where even the outcasts of society have flung him. This consolidation of Giorgio’s emotive progression along a continuous arc has the added effect of determining a subtle shift in genre for Passione d’amore with respect to the novel. Let us recall that Tarchetti’s novel is primarily a horror novel interwoven with Fosca’s lacerating love for Giorgio and his gradual, physical and moral decline. He does not reciprocate her love until the end of the novel, remaining trapped up to that point in a web of social conventions, mistaken diagnoses, feelings of guilt and disquieting, incomprehensible “influences”. At different moments throughout the book, one has the impression that human and social factors cannot sufficiently account for Giorgio’s behavior and deterioration. One is aware of the presence of some invisible force that dampens his will and drains his vital energy. This is exactly what occurs in Tarchetti’s, I fatali, a fantastic tale in which the mere presence of the mysterious Baron di Saternez is enough to gradually undermine his fiancée’s health.14 As in the quintessential ghost story, Tarchetti’s Giorgio glimpses a mysterious presence reflected in a mirror: “Vi fu un istante in cui mi parve che lo specchio riflettesse il viso di un’altra persona che era dietro di me e vi si affacciava curvandosi dietro la mia spalla. Trasalii, e feci atto di rivolgermi; il lume mi scivolò di mano, cadde e si spense” (Tarchetti 1988, 167) [There was a moment when the mirror seemed to reflect the face of another person, who was standing behind me, bending over my shoulder to gaze at his image. I started, and motioned to turn. The candle slipped from my hand, fell, and was extinguished] (Tarchetti 1994, 176—177). This intangible presence seems almost like a spectral version of Fosca, if it is true that “in tutti gli angoli della camera mi pareva di veder Fosca guardarmi inesorabile e minacciosa” (Tarchetti 1988, 142) [in every corner of the room, I seemed to see Fosca casting her inexorable, threatening glance at me] (Tarchetti 1994, 147). When moments later she appears, “le sue fattezze orribilmente alterate, il pallore del suo volto cadaverico” (Tarchetti 1988, 143) [her features horribly altered, the pallor of her face 13

On the theme of the dwarf and its symbolic value, see my entry in Ceserani 2006. 14 Of particular significance is the opening phrase: “Esistono realmente esseri destinati ad esercitare un’influenza sinistra sugli uomini e sulle cose che li circondano?” [Do there exist in reality, beings destined to exert a sinister influence on man and on the things that surround them?] (Tarchetti 1967 II, 7).

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cadaverous] (Tarchetti 1994, 148) bestow on her the appearance of a revenant. As if this were not enough, the protagonist is tormented by terrible dreams, as often happens to those visited by vampires: Non tardai ad assopirmi, ma passai una notte terribile; ebbi l’incubo; un fantasma spaventevole s’era buttato sopra di me e mi stringeva, mi soffocava col suo peso; sentivo un affanno, un caldo, una sete, un’oppressura da non dirsi; al mattino mi svegliai come istupidito, mi sembrava di non esser desto (Tarchetti 1988, 132). 15 I was not long in dozing off, but I passed a terrible night. I was haunted by a nightmare. A dreadful phantasm hurled itself on top of me, squeezing me, suffocating me beneath its weight. I felt breathless, hot, thirsty, unspeakably oppressed. In the morning I awoke stupefied, feeling as if I were not awake (Tarchetti 1994, 136).

It was then perhaps not by chance that on the morning following Fosca’s visit to Giorgio, the doctor finds his condition significantly worsened (Tarchetti 1988, 137). Nor is it by chance that Fosca affirms that she is able to see Giorgio in the dark (Tarchetti 1994, 135), or that she demonstrates a surprising strength when she grabs his hand under the table. (Tarchetti 1988, 70). We can therefore also literally interpret the presentiment that overtakes Giorgio at the beginning of his illness as a direct result of his meetings with Fosca: Una cosa sovratutto [...] contribuiva ad accrescere il mio dolore: il pensiero fisso, continuo, orrendo, che quella donna volesse trascinarmi con sé nella tomba. Essa doveva morire presto, ciò era evidente. Il vederla già consunta, già incadaverita, abbracciarmi, avvinghiarmi, tenermi stretto sul suo seno durante quei suoi spasimi, era cosa che dava ogni giorno maggior forza a questa fissazione spaventevole (Tarchetti 1988, 123).16

15

See also Tarchetti 1988, 151. “Oltre ai pericoli di queste sue visite, oltre alla fissazione terribile che si era impadronita di me e di cui ho già parlato - che essa volesse trascinarmi con sé nella tomba (e io la vedeva avvicinarvisi, deperire miseramente ogni giorno) m’era pure fisso in capo che lo spavento incussomi da que’ suoi accessi nervosi, la vicinanza continua, il contatto, quel non so che di morboso che vi era in lei, avrebbero dovuto, o tardi o tosto, sviluppare in me la stessa malattia” (Tarchetti 1988, 138) [Beyond the dangers of her visits, beyond the terrible obsession that had seized me and whereof I have already spoken—that she wanted to drag me to the grave with her (and I saw myself approaching it, my strength miserably deteriorating every day) I still firmly believed that the fear she aroused in me with her nervous fits, her 16

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Tarchetti’s Fosca e Scola’s Passione d’amore: A Comparison One thing, above all [...] contributed to my ever-growing pain: the fixed, constant, horrendous thought that this woman wanted to drag me to the grave with her. She would necessarily die soon, that was evident. The sight of her already quite wasted, already corpse-like, embracing me, clinging to me, clasping me tightly to her breast during her agonies, was something that daily reinforced my frightful obsession (Tarchetti 1994, 125—126).

The deadly influence that Fosca exercises over Giorgio (and which the doctor interprets as a nervous condition) is contextualized within the framework of the emergent trend of vampire literature during the 1800s (Tarchetti’s time), in particular, the female-vampire figure, described exhaustively in Gautier’s La Morte amoureuse, in Baudelaire’s Le Vampire e Les Métamorphoses du vampire, and in Emilio Praga’s Dama elegante17 (and a few years after Fosca, Le Fanu’s Carmilla follows suit). For the nineteenth century reader, the vogue of this type of literature must have conferred a profoundly ambiguous character on the Giorgio-Fosca vicissitudes, raising the suspicion that concealed behind this sad story of neurosis was a more terrifying case of hypnotic subjugation and supernatural parasitism—a vampirism of the emotions, if not of blood.18 Scola, for his part, certainly gathered Fosca’s vampiric character and brought it to the screen by including a reference to the fact that she intended to drag Giorgio with her to the grave, and also by combining Fosca’s scream with the image of a skull, thus creating the effect of a continual nearness, her touch, her inexplicable morbidity would sooner or later result in my contracting the same illness] (Tarchetti 1988, 143). 17 See the example of the very skinny, fascinating, and fatal woman in Praga 1969, 144-145: “O bella donna che sembri uno stelo/ mietuto in cielo,/ m’han raccontato che di molti amanti,/ nei camposanti,/ tu puoi legger la lapide forbita,/ che uscîr di vita/ sotto le spire del tuo corpo anelo;/ o bella donna che sembri uno stelo.” On this topic see Conti and Pezzini 2005 and Tardiola, 1991. 18 It is interesting to observe that commonly in the 1800s the deadly lover possesses the irresistible beauty of an enchantress. It is therefore Tarchetti’s original variation to give his protagonist such an extreme ugliness, hypnotic by its own right—an idea that may derive from Poe’s Berenice. “Among the numerous train of maladies superinduced by that fatal and primary one which effected a revolution of so horrible a kind in the moral and physical being of my cousin, may be mentioned as the most distressing and obstinate in its nature, a species of epilepsy not infrequently terminating in trance itself—trance very nearly resembling positive dissolution, and from which her manner of recovery was in most instances, startlingly abrupt. In the mean time my own disease—for I have been told that I should call it by no other appellation—my own disease, then, grew rapidly upon me” (Poe 1966, 172).

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screaming undead. 19 At no other moment of the film, however, is the vampiric allusion so clear as in the protagonist’s first entrance. Here Fosca is shot from below, with her face lit by a lateral light source, which makes her eye sockets stand out and hides her eyes in two, big spots of shadow. Her hair is pulled back, throwing into relief her protruding ears and, thanks to Valeria D’Obici’s ample forehead and the angle of the shot, nearly creating the illusion of a completely bald, skull-like head. Represented in this manner, Fosca’s figure practically becomes a visual citation of Murnau’s Nosferatu, with whose repugnant vampire the young woman is made out to share a monstrous similarity. Such vampiric elements, however, are purely metaphorical as indications that Fosca’s situation is like a vampire story, and that Giorgio’s obsession and consumption are like the symptoms of a supernatural possession; in the end, they remain solely the expression of an uncommon way of feeling.20 The vampire hypothesis of Fosca’s affect on Giorgio is essentially translated as a realistic, psychological trait that is common to Scola’s characters, or rather, “[una] forte vocazione egoistica, che tende a sopraffare il prossimo attraverso atteggiamenti crudeli, ma insieme anche ingenui e autodistruttivi” [a strong, egoistic vocation inclined to overwhelm the other with cruel behavior, that is equally naïve and selfdestructive] (Bíspuri 2006, 89). Along the same lines, Scola eliminates the theme of the double, so precious to nineteenth century fantastic narrative, present in Tarchetti’s novel in the form of all too precise parallelisms between Fosca and Clara: when Giorgio discovers that Fosca is 25 years old, his first thought is one of stupor at the odd coincidence, “L’età di Clara!” [The same age as Clara!] (Tarchetti 1988, 50); the early phase of his love for Clara, when Giorgio must content himself with listening to the singing and piano playing downstairs, corresponds to the period of waiting for Fosca, as yet unseen but introduced by heart-rending screams; the romantic walks with Clara, culminating in an abandoned countryside cottage, correspond to the train ride with Fosca and the overnight stay in the Carters’ Inn; when Clara abandons Giorgio point-blank, a literal cross-transformation of one woman

19 The image also seems like a visual citation of a poem “Memento!”,by Tarchetti, “Quando bacio il tuo labbro profumato,/ cara fanciulla, non posso obbliare/ che un bianco teschio v’è sotto celato./ Quando a me stringo il tuo corpo vezzoso,/ obliar non poss’io, cara fanciulla,/ che vi è sotto uno scheletro nascoso./ E nell’orrenda visione assorto,/ dovunque o tocchi, o baci, o la man posi…/ sento sporger le fredde ossa di morto!” (Tarchetti 1967, 459). 20 On the fantastic as metaphor for reality, see Bíspuri 2006, 91.

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into the other is actualized when Fosca becomes the object of love and Clara is explicitly defined as “a monster” (Tarchetti 1988, 167). In his intimacy with the material, Scola is primarily moved by an imperative of realism. He eliminates the most suspect coincidences (eg. his Fosca is 29 years old, while Clara’s age is unknown)—those parallelisms that are too rigid or “formal” —for the purpose of re-translating that quasiarchetypal series of oppositions in the novel (especially life/death) into a plausible rivalry between two very different women. In fact, while in Tarchetti the two women are nothing alike, and at the very most only circumstantially come to exchange roles as monster and angel, in Passione d’amore Fosca appears humanized in the end, in the scene of the sexual encounter with Giorgio. Here her hair is down, falling onto her shoulders, softening the contours of her face and concealing her pointy ears. The lighting is more suffused and delicate, made to attenuate the angularity of her face and lend a hint of vitality to her complexion. In the climactic intercourse scene the nearly frontal orientation of Fosca’s face with respect to the camera, erases the beak-like shape of her nose and reveals a glimmer of light in her eyes. All this is not enough to transform her into Clara (as portrayed by Laura Antonelli) but it does give her the dignity of being human and a woman, just as Giorgio undoubtedly intends her to be. We can now understand that in Passione d’amore, differently from Fosca, the dangerous and the terrifying do not stem from the eruption of a dark force, suggestive of the supernatural realm, but rather from the bursting open of an unsuspected and all too natural interior abyss that is therefore a-rational and a-cultural. Into this vortex, every precautionary attempt and hope of normality tumbles. Yes, the threat emerges from the darkness but that darkness originates within us. Once unleashed, there is no escape, no way to awaken from the nightmare,21 any more than one can escape oneself. In this way, Scola has exchanged the passion-drenched horror story that is Tarchetti’s novel, for a story about the devastating aspect of love immersed in a Gothic-tinted scenery—a modification that comes through in the differing proportions of thematic material (love/horror). The end result: the director wins the tacit self-challenge that seems to be behind this a-typical project, namely, to transpose from the Scapigliatura. At the risk of sinning by metaphorical excess, I will note that if La terrazza was the testament to Italian-style comedy, Passione d’amore is its tomb—a macabre monument that forcefully emphasizes its nonexistence. Yet the notable survival of those elements and basic 21

As does occur in Tarchetti’s Fosca.

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language that animated (and will continue to animate) Scola’s films, is a sign of continuity, of an artistic plan that spans the most diverse pieces. It is also evidence of a persisting cinematic approach recently labeled “humanistic,” an approach that while keeping in mind the socio- and geopolitical differences in which the individuals find themselves, knows how to draw out an overpowering force from those fundamental and universal components of our nature that unify our species, from the intellectuals of La terrazza to the little boy in Vorrei che volo, to Giorgio in Passione d’amore, to I who write and you the reader. Translated by Stefania Sidoli-Stewart

Works Cited Baudelaire, Charles. 2006. Complete Poems. Manchester, UK: Carcanet. Bertini, Antonio, ed. 1996. Ettore Scola: Il cinema e io. Rome: Officina. Bíspuri, Ennio. 2006. Ettore Scola, un umanista nel cinema italiano. Rome: Bulzoni. Brunetta, Gian Piero. 1993. Storia del cinema italiano. Rome: Editori Riuniti. Buzzati, Dino. 2001. Il deserto dei Tartari. Milan: Mondadori. Ceserani, Remo et al., ed. 2006. Dizionario dei temi letterari. Turin: UTET. Conti Arianna and Pezzini Franco. 2005. Le vampire: Crimini e misfatti delle succhiasangue da Carmilla a Van Helsing. Rome: Castelvecchi. De Santi, Pier Marco and Rossano Vittori. 1987. I film di Ettore Scola. Rome: Gremese. Dürrenmatt, Friedrich. 1960. Traps. New York: Knopf. Ellero, Roberto. 1995. Ettore Scola. Milano: Il Castoro. Gautier, Théophile. 1992. Spirite, suivi de La Morte amoureuse. Paris: Flammarion. Gieri, Manuela. 1995. Contemporary Italian Filmmaking. Strategies of Subversion: Pirandello, Fellini, Scola and the Directors of the New Generation. Toronto-Buffalo-London: University of Toronto Press. Iaccio, Pasquale. 2002. “Non ti piace la fine del XX secolo?”: La storia nei film di Scola. In Trevico-Cinecittà: L’avventuroso viaggio di Ettore Scola, ed. Vito Zagarrio, 133—145. Venice: Marsilio. Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. 1998. Carmilla. Mountain Ash, UK: Sarob Press. Marlia, Giulio, ed. 1999. Ettore Scola: Il volto amaro della Commedia all’italiana. Viareggio-Lucca: Mauro Baroni.

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Masi, Stefano. 2006. Ettore Scola. Rome: Gremese. Micheli, Paola. 1994. Ettore Scola, i film e le parole. Rome: Bulzoni. Nepoti, Roberto. 2002. Famiglie, terrazze, cene: i film corali. In TrevicoCinecittà: L’avventuroso viaggio di Ettore Scola, ed. Vito Zagarrio, 197—204. Venice: Marsilio. Poe, Edgar Allan. 1996. Complete Stories and Poems. New York-London: Doubleday. Praga, Emilio. 1969. Poesie. Bari: Laterza. Russo, Paolo, ed. 2002. Ettore Scola: Pesaro, 21-29 giugno 2002. Pesaro: Fondazione Pesaro Nuovo Cinema Onlus. Tarchetti, Igino Ugo. Fosca. 1994. Trans. Lawrence Venuti. San Francisco: Mercury House. —. 1967. Tutte le opere. Bologna: Cappelli. —. 1988. Fosca. Milan: Mondadori. Tardiola, Giuseppe. 1991. Il vampiro nella letteratura italiana. Anzio, Rome: De Rubeis. Tassone, Aldo, ed. 1979-1980. Parla il cinema italiano. Milan: Il Formichiere. Troyes, Chrétien de. 1997. Lancelot: The Knight of the Cart. New Haven: Yale University Press.

ARCHIBUGI, A “WRITER” ON THE SET DANIELA DE PAU, DREXEL UNIVERSITY

Mais avant cette histoire-là, il faut en raconter une autre. L’histoire de comment se racontent les histories, comment les images travaillent à raconter les images. Ou encore: comment les histoires arrivent à trouver leur place dans les images.1 But before that story begins, we should narrate another one. The story of how stories are narrated, how images work to narrate stories. Or also: how stories find their place inside images.

From its title onwards, the film Con gli occhi chiusi by the Roman director, Francesca Archibugi, and adapted from the eponymous novel written in 1919 by Federico Tozzi, is a compelling and engaging film, for at least two clear reasons: it promises a strong emotional response from the viewer, based on the poetic allusion to the duality of love and blindness and it is a cinematic interpretation of a book that is highly suggestive, enigmatic and difficult to interpret.2 In her fourth role as director, and having written the screenplays for her previous three films, Archibugi reflects on the artistic process of cinematic adaptation and finds, in this new work, a stylistic and narrative confirmation of her own approach to filmmaking, projecting a well-defined authorial voice in this film. With this work, the Roman artist continues her interest in treating themes that are typical of the Bildungsroman and confronts, outside her usual boundaries, a text that she describes as “cangiante, subdolo e 1

Aumont 1995, 135. Translation is mine, as in the case of all further translations, unless otherwise stated. 2 From the title, one can infer that, to understand the book, it is necessary to close one’s eyes and identify with the protagonist’s vague and unresolved feelings. Taking such a rebellion to visual representation to the screen entails a definite challenge, unless “light” or another interpretation was suggested elsewhere. Witness Kubrick’s courageous Eyes Wide Shut (1999), a film that remains faithful to the representation of a couple’s unconscious thoughts (narrated in the book by Arthur Schnitzel), converting them into gorgeous images, minimal plot and ambiguous results.

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nascosto” [shifting, sneaky, and elusive] (Proto, 53) and that at times she even finds incompatible, since it appears gloomy and lacking characters to love (Miccichè, 113). Not surprisingly, the director herself defined this work as experimental, in that for her it represented an internal laboratory (Martini and Morelli, 127). The artistic process undertaken here is aptly described by Roberta Menga, according to whom the film adds to the director’s cinematographic writing process “un tono nuovo e diverso, uno stile molto più elaborato ad un tessuto narrativo che, partendo dalla traduzione per il cinema di un testo letterario, sembra in perfetta sintonia con il mondo creato dalla Archibugi in tutti i suoi anni di lavoro” [a new and different tone, a more elaborate style of the narrative fabric which, in the context of the cinematic adaptation of a literary text, seems to be in perfect harmony with the world that Archibugi has created in her career in filmmaking] (Martini and Morelli, 127). Regarding Con gli occhi chiusi, the first attempt of her career (1994) at adapting a work of literature to the screen, the director affirms in an interview to have chosen an atypical path: instead of betraying the plot of the book to remain faithful to its spirit, she faithfully borrowed the story about Pietro and Ghisola from Tozzi (hence the same title), thus betraying the novel’s spirit (Riviello, 260). Having chosen such an approach, she relies on a close personal reading of the book and decides to re-write its story because, as she states, “è lo stile che ti suggerisce l’idea” [it is the style that inspires the idea] (Airos, 3). The director then confirms her identity as “narratrice sul set” [narrator on the set]3 and, using her usual intimist-realistic style to reinvent the original story, ends up assigning new meanings to the existential themes of the book. The incipit of the film illustrates the thematic and compositional rapport that the director establishes between her art and this novel; an incipit that is worth noting here for its evocative beauty. The initial sound of trotting horses is met shortly afterwards with images of their hooves belonging to the didactic fresco Allegoria del buongoverno by Ambrogio

3

As Furio Scarpelli had referred to her (Proto, 15). Having authored or coauthored almost all of the screenplays of her films, she can be considered among the array of “writers” for the cinema. Archibugi attests to how unreal the“Berlin wall” is, as Fumagalli conceives of it, which divides literature from cinema. To this end, she testifies how the two arts, still remaining two autonomous expressive forms, belong to the same category of narration; or perhaps, as Fumagalli adds, it is more correct to talk about “un unico mondo narrativo che si esprime con due mezzi diversi” [a single narrative world that expresses itself with two different means] (16).

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Lorenzetti4. Following the rhythm of the horses’ movement, the camera widens its angle to observe, at first the industry of medieval small town life, and then the rolling Tuscan hills, while the trotting gives way to the melodic wandering of the camera/pen. Having reached the farm Poggio a’ Meli, we pass from the setting to the plot. Mario Sesti comments on this sequence L’occhio, adulto e creatore, che articola e ricostruisce l’affresco, indugia ingenuo, curioso, assorto come se vedesse le cose rappresentate (gli animali, gli uomini, le cose), per la prima volta, e poi vi aggiungesse nella propria fantasia i rumori, le voci, i suoni. Come un bambino (Proto, 7). The eye, both adult and creator, that articulates and reconstructs the fresco, lingers naive, curious, absorbed as if it saw the things that are represented (animals, men, objects), for the first time, and then as if it added in the imagination noises, voices, sounds. Like a child.

Such a preface, rightly intended by Sesti as an allegory of the director’s work, seems to illustrate (almost with childish wonder) the diversity of this artistic medium with respect to literature, since narration through film happens, above all, through sounds and images, even before dialogue comes into play.5 The movement of the camera within this fresco is representative of the way in which Archibugi intends to adapt this literary work to film. The fresco represents her personal “vision” of the book and the path that features in the painting corresponds to the spiritual road that she takes through Tozzi’s novel, from which she chooses images (facts) to recreate for the viewer the emotions she felt as a reader. In its diegetic valency, the painting moreover incorporates a particular lesson into the narrative texture. With his fresco,6 Lorenzetti aimed to exhort the citizens of Siena to form an ideal city, based on the concept of justice, so as to avoid war and other disasters. Metaphorically, the sun of justice illuminates the positive progression of the city, (depicted in its civic life) that shines as it flourishes, secure and beautiful, enjoying a profitable relationship with the countryside. In these favourable circumstances, peace and prosperity allow for dedication to maintaining the private 4

Fresco on display in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. Referring to the relationship between literature and cinema, Antonio Costa affirms that to insert a system of static representation inside the flux of a dynamic representation performs a function in the represented scene and contrasts, at least at a perceptive level, the two models in question (Castelnuovo, Enrico, 148). 6 This painting, in line with her writing style, represents the height of topographic realism in the Middle Ages. 5

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environment, which reflects a serene domestic intimacy.7 The director recalls Lorenzetti’s teaching to show the positive effects that follow when nature is in harmony with the citizens. In this way, Archibugi operates a major shift from the spirit of the novel, translating the uncertainties of Tozzi’s relationship to nature8 into an attitude that she conceives as being “illuminated”, since it is guided by strong principles and ideals. This beginning constitutes, moreover, an important prelude to the spatial-temporal poetics adopted in the film, for which it provides the second ideological foundation, after the above-mentioned epistemological shift. On the one hand, it evokes the meta-historical setting of the story, represented by the timeless charm of the carriage trip that the young Pietro makes from Siena to the farm where Ghisola lives; a trip which becomes an existential journey for the protagonist while he travels through his amorous dream. The director chooses to conserve the dialect, the dress, and the atmosphere of the early twentieth century as a sign of affinity with the book, but at the same time reassesses the importance of certain contextual elements, such as historical details, class resentment and Pietro’s political choices. From the narrated events, she instead gives preference to the psychological aspect of the characters’ experience, removing temporal details from the happenings of their lives, and placing greater attention on the development of their love story. In the film, we perceive this element when Pietro becomes temporarily infatuated with socialism as a means of overcoming the disappointment of the end of his relationship with Ghisola, while in the novel such political interest emerges at various moments throughout the story, demonstrating the protagonist’s psychological evolution. Indeed, Pietro’s political concerns in the novel are initially derived from sincere adherence to personal ideals, through which he acquires the impulse to redeem his own sense of individuality, repressed by paternal authority. Further on, however, those same ideals, having become simply an attempt to conform to changing 7

The inscription that refers to this section of the fresco, cited in the film, and that exemplifies such conduct is the following: “Turn your eyes to behold her/ you, who are governing, who is portrayed here (Justice), / crowned on account of her excellence,/who always renders to everyone his due./ Look how many goods derive from her/ and how sweet and peaceful is that life / of the city where is preserved/ this virtue who outshines any other/ She guards and defends/ those who honour her/ and nourishes and feeds them./ From her light is born (both)/ Requiting those who do good / and giving due punishment to the wicked (Starn, 101). 8 In Tozzi’s writing, nature was internalised and symbolised the difficult negotiation between the self and the exterior world (Proto, 55).

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times (62), represent the defeat and surrender on his part, that accelerate the process of his self-inflicted blindness. In contrast, in the cinematic adaptation, Pietro’s tormented adolescence and his difficulties in confronting manhood are transformed into a reflection on how to come to terms with feelings of love, as an eternal model of existential knowledge. For this reason, Ghisola acquires greater depth as a character in the film with respect to the novel.9 For the director, rebalancing the feminine presence in this way represents a means of portraying more truthfully the dynamics of the emotions that accompany the coming of age of two adolescents who are facing violent test. Their failure to conquer these obstacles creates wounds which can only be healed with maturity. On the other hand, such a beginning contains the premise of temporal directionality because it retraces Tozzi’s enigmatic narrative, to uncover the sense of becoming that had remained entangled in the abstractness of emotions in his writing.10 By doing so, the director resolves the challenge of selecting a formal approach that would best suit the original plot, which had seemed suspended in time. It is problematic to elaborate a cinematic plot from a literary work in which the narrative style (symbolized by the main character) is the true protagonist; a style that expresses a poetics, beginning with the title itself, of the refusal of reality on many levels, involving all characters and also the possibility of narrating them (Chiarenza, 38). The director unties this stylistic knot—translating into images a plot that negates the facts and fundamentally calls into question the narrative temporality—by adopting an opposite perspective and entrusting to the camera the function of narrating elements that the writer had refused to reveal. She thus investigates the lives of the protagonists and, following their journeys through intricate details of human experience, finds her own narrative voice.11 9

Moreover, deepening Ghisola’s character adds greater thematic interest to the film, since it permits an exploration of the consciousness of a woman who lived, in that specific historical moment, outside of marriage. 10 As Debenedetti notes, in the book “non si impara mai il vocabolario normale, comunicativo che battezza le azioni e le vedute della vita ordinaria; si impara invece il gergo intimo, senza riscontri esterni, con cui si battezzano, per sè soli, le amebe della vita interiore, inafferrabili, impossibili a definirsi perchè prive di punti di riferimento” [one never learns a common, communicative vocabulary, that baptized actions and views of daily life; instead, one learns the intimate jargon, without external comparison, with which one baptized, only for oneself, the mutations of the inner life, elusive, impossible to define because lacking a point of reference] (223). 11 One should remember that Archibugi defined herself as a grandniece of neorealism, niece of Commedia all’Italiana, and daughter of the generation of the

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With renewed trust in the capacity of cinema to describe the world and to narrate stories, Archibugi continues her exploration inside human relationships, undertaken in previous works, but this time in a film using costumes. The motivations for such a choice are analogous to those expressed with regard to her second adaptation, I Promessi Sposi [The Betrothed] (2004), in which the director wanted to explore certain sentiments and relationships in a different time period from the contemporary to “renderle più astratte, meno sociologiche e quindi per certi aspetti più pure” [render them more abstract, less sociological and, in a sense, purer], as well as “fare una specie di bilancio personale” [to make some sort of personal balance] (Martini and Morelli, 414). Following such objectives, the film removes from the text the presence of the figural, in a Lyotardian sense, as an unconscious force that breaks the rules of language, which in the book emphasised Pietro’s condition of estrangement from life and hence the difficulty of representing him. Archibugi removes that sense of anguish intended as a final stage before absurdity, which placed Tozzi in the company of authors occupying the space between existentialism and the Nouveau Roman (Galvan, 101). Instead, she adds a narrative fighting spirit to the story which, in the context of late twentieth-century Italian cinema, re-affirms the need for self-expression with the clear voice of an author against the sentiments of a generation “sperduta nel nulla” [lost in nothingness] (Marrone, 9). According to Levantesi, Archibugi’s cinema appears to be “un possibile cinema dei Pugni in Tasca” [a possible cinema with Fists in the Pockets] (Miccichè, 115). With the intention of giving back a narrative rationality to the symbols present in the book, the director bases their cinematic representation on 1970s (Laviosa, 1). Manuela Gieri cites her as an example of a contemporary director, together with Giuseppe Tornatore, in whom a certain nostalgia towards the ethical and the aesthetic beliefs of neo-realism is manifest, since she is motivated by the intent to create a sense of continuity with such a past (Gieri, 210). Her desire to belong to the national identity is apparent, among other things, in the books she chose to adapt, from Tozzi and Manzoni. In her last film, Lezioni di volo (2008), the director remains faithful to her style and at the same time produces a convincing narrative when, expanding her view beyond the Alps, she embraces the reality of India and renders it fertile soil for a journey of initiation for two Italian eighteen-years-old boys in search of their identity. Drawing strength from her proclaimed genealogy, the director, in an interview with Mario Sesti, defends herself from the accusation that she has produced a cinema that belongs to the “carino” genre, by saying: “I make a certain type of cinema that is quite naturalistic, more than realistic [...] I am satisfied by the fact that I have established a form of communication with the audience” (Laviosa, 1).

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expressive techniques conforming to the traditional rules of order, harmony and balance. This new discursive transparency enables her to compare, with greater objectivity, the psychological attitude of someone who refuses to see the world around him with the potentially negative consequences of such a mindset. Even though Pietro’s eyes had remained closed on the written page, Archibugi aims to show through film why and when Pietro could and should have opened them. Her work, therefore, presents diegetic knowledge which avoids doubts and unresolved questions and draws objective conclusions from a series of consequential facts: by ignoring reality, one ends up facing inevitable catastrophes. It is, however, important to observe that the restless charm of the writer from Siena is not lost. Instead, it is effectively translated into cinematic action through various expressive expedients such as: dizzying shots from above that suggest emotional tension; bright and symbolic use of a colour such as white, whose blinding candor at times surrounds both of the young lovers; or sudden close-ups that probe from within the characters’ sensitivity at the moments when it is put to the test. This sensitivity is also frequently explored through representations of the landscape and animals, such as the red sunset just as Ghisola realises there can be no future with Pietro, and the episode of the cow giving birth and rejecting her own offspring, an action whose immense cruelty functions as a premonition of the couple’s definitive rupture.12 The director seems to perceive, in the words of Sesti, “che è nella sensibilità esasperata della scrittura di Tozzi la rappresentazione di quella identità sentimentale che fa di ogni incertezza una ferita grave e di ogni accordo, per quanto provvisorio, un’estasi” [that it is in Tozzi’s exacerbated sensitivity that we find the representation of that sentimental identity that renders every uncertainty a serious wound and every agreement, albeit temporary, an ecstasy] (Proto, 7). Another expressive feature is the musical element, whose strong physiognomic symbolism serves to evoke the emotional and psychological surges that motivate the images, as well as to recover some of the poetic aura of the book. In this regard, two scenes are of particular interest, and represent the result of Archibugi’s re-elaboration of the text.13 In both 12 The scene of the cow who rejects her offspring effectively translates into images the inexplicable cruelty of Pietro’s castration at the hands of his father, a trauma that had lead, in the book, to the animalization of the characters, who acted according to a “animazione invidiosa” [envious animation] (Bedenedetti, 234), which was dangerously harmful in its unaccountability. 13 They are reinvented because in the book on Sunday Ghisola goes to the square by herself and makes a friend read the lyrics of the song (39). Furthermore, on the

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scenes, shot in the Piazza del Campo in Siena, the singer Nada Malanima performs a song entitled “Nati alberi” [We Were Born Trees], which offers a precious glimpse of Ghisola’s emotions (otherwise obscure in the book).14 The director uses this musical moment to convey her solidarity with the female protagonist and her misadventures, as well as to unveil the different stages that the relationship between the two young lovers undergoes during the two parts of the film. In the first part of the film we hear: ci pensi mai amore mio / esseri alberi / due come noi amore mio / fin da piccoli / stare sempre insieme / come nati dentro un bosco a volere bene solo a quello che conosco / invece io sono andata via / perché non lo so più / ci penso sempre a casa mia / e lì vicino / sempre stato tu Do you ever think my love/that we could be trees/two like us my love/ since we were young/to always be together/as if we were born in the woods to care only about what I know, instead I left/why I don’t know anymore/ I always think about my house/ and, close by, you were always there

These lyrics are directed to Ghisola and seem to warn her of her unlucky destiny: she will remember with nostalgia her relationship with Pietro born from intense feelings, as instinctive and inevitable as they were natural, yet forcibly interrupted, full of regrets and with no hope of a return. The song plays at the moment when the two young people first meet outside Poggio, and Ghisola is surprised as she perceives Pietro’s affectionate presence behind her. Along with the gift of the beautiful words of the love song, she also receives an admonishment from the acrobat Cicciosodo that she is too young to take these words to heart: a warning that the director causes both youths to ignore when Pietro reads them to her back at the farm. The acrobat’s prophesy, of course, comes true (during the first part of the film) in the scene of the castration of the animals, when the disagreement between Pietro and his father—who considers his son to be inept—develops into an adolescent Oedipus complex. Pietro’s love for Ghisola is rejected by his father’s authority and, for this reason, the girl will be obliged to abandon the farm, thereby becoming an unknowing victim of a dynamic that does not directly involve her. To remedy this injustice, she will seek affection where it is not to be found, eventually becoming a prostitute. second occasion, the two teenagers meet at Mr. Alberto’s’ house, and not in the square (69—70). 14 The song was composed by the director’s husband, the musician Battista Lena.

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In the second part of the film, when the two meet again as adults, the following lines are added to the song: ci pensi mai amore mio essere alberi / saremmo noi amore mio / più contenti / uno come te / in ogni posto non l’ho trovato / nei boschi / nei giardini / nelle siepi ti ho cercato Do you ever think, my love/that we could be trees/ would we be my love/ happier/ one like you/ in every place I never found/ in the woods/ in gardens/in hedges I looked for you

These lyrics are now directed to Pietro, who has, only now, become superstitiously conscious of the prophetic value of the song, so much so that he requests it to fill the emptiness caused by his long separation from Ghisola. The song makes the protagonist realise that his lover still desired him throughout her absence. The old admonishment of not heeding the words of love becomes relevant once again, since Pietro will demonstrate his inability to accept the loss of his lover’s innocence and thus compel her to depart for good. The setting of these two musical scenes offers additional insight into Archibugi’s “reading” of the novel. Just as in cinema we are able to see reality represented in its dual nature of truth and fiction and comprehend its symbolic importance, the two characters listen to the song in the square and fall under its spell because the truth of their story is captured in the lyrics. The newly recast spell, however, does not succeed in curing Pietro’s illness and the director uses this scene to highlight his failed chance to heal. The dynamic of watching while being watched (in the “little theatre of love”) is further filtered through another lens, that of the movie camera. This time it is the viewer who witnesses another truth: that which is represented by the eye of the movie camera that ultimately gives the responsibility for ending the relationship to Pietro, who is incapable of facing reality as an adult.15 According to Mario Sesti, “è certo il film con più superfici, avvallamenti, scarpate e dolcezze tra quelli della Archibugi” [out of all of Archibugi’s films, this one certainly has the most surfaces, valleys, embankments and charm] (Francesca Archibugi, 7). Such are the movements of the soul that the director conveys by means of a strong

15 The use of the semi-subjective image emphasises that the story narrated here should be perceived as having been consciously transformed and automatically restored by Archibugi (Deleuze, 94), who, in this case, makes the viewer aware that he/she is viewing the protagonists’ feelings, as well as the meanings that the director’s interpretation attributes to them.

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expressive symbolism so as to preserve the appeal of the autobiographical account of first love. Returning to thematic considerations, one can note that, in order to trace—in both a linear and explicit manner—the emotionally tormented experiences of the protagonists, Archibugi’s work focuses primarily on the unfolding of the story by choosing, re-ordering and re-elaborating the key points of the book. She inserts new episodes that add to the credibility of the facts, as well as serve to fill in the empty spaces.16 The story is reconstructed and reinterpreted based on episodes that are merely hinted at in the novel, but are instead crucial in the film for an understanding of the events in question and for the psychological exploration that accompanies them. Thus, we see two distinct ways of understanding the plot of this novel. As Galvan points out, for Tozzi, the plot “non è più il risultato delle azioni dei singoli personaggi, ma il prodotto di forze occulte o del caso” [is no longer the result of the actions of the individual characters, but instead the product of occult and random forces] (107). In contrast, and according to a realistic perspective, for the director the plot is the sum total of multiple events that change the circumstances in which we live and determine, or limit, the possible choices we make. Following this principle, the cinematic narration acquires a choral dimension, within which the various characters interact, influencing each another’s destinies. A scene that successfully illustrates this vision shows the faces of all of the characters in church singing a Christmas carol: the last one to be shown, significantly isolated from the rest of the group, is Pietro, whose blindness renders him an outsider to the community in which he lives. This satellite scene, which brings to mind Cesare Zavattini’s conception of life “viewed through a keyhole”, permits the director to illustrate the environment in which the story unfolds: that of a rural, Catholic community dominated by traditional values, where the weight of collective judgment heavily influences the relationship of the young lovers. Indeed, when Pietro and Ghisola are discovered (in the film) together by a farmhand after having innocently spent the night together in the barn, she is defamed and expelled from the farm because the owner fears she may lead Pietro astray, and he has already had difficulty in finding his role in society. Not even Pietro’s mother, whose character receives greater development in the film than in the book and appears less subject to the authority of her husband, is able to avert Domenico’s verdict against the young girl. 16

With reference to adaptation strategies, Marcus talked about “the intervening movements of induction and deduction which produce an appropriate cinematic “re-writing” (15).

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By reinterpreting the significance of Pietro and Ghisola’s experiences, the director transforms the aura of superstition, the ghosts of death, the spectres of nightmares and the fears that the novel visits upon the couple into a considerably more concrete atmosphere, with real obstacles and well-defined emotions. In the novel the protagonists are “due facce di un unico personaggio” [two faces of the same character], psychologically the same, since they are both immobile in their internal malaise (Galvan, 105). They represent two separate universes that clash and, due to their resemblance, attract yet also repel one another. In the film, in contrast, they are dynamic figures interacting with each other and the reality around them. In a significant episode from the novel Ghisola kills five sparrows, experiencing excitement and terror at killing the defenseless animals (18). In the film, however, this act is portrayed as a response to Pietro’s earlier cutting of her thigh with a pocketknife. In this reinterpretation, we note that she is able to respond to Pietro’s actions and thus evolve, even though she confesses to her aunt that she also prefers love “with closed eyes”. Throughout the course of the cinematic narration, Ghisola transforms herself from an egocentric character, proud and corrupt as she appears in the novel, into a more positive and human figure, who at times elicits the sympathy of the viewer. It is, nevertheless, progressively harder to feel sympathy for Pietro, because his illness eventually becomes pure denial. He is incapable of communicating with his loved one and maintains a deceptive visual relationship with her that precludes any real verbal exchange and hence any possibility of affective evolution. Blinded by her beauty, he reaches the point of attributing such external aspects to the purity of her spirit, substituting physical beauty for moral values. This aspect reveals itself in the episode where Pietro declares to his father that he wants to marry Ghisola, and responds to Domenico’s accusation that he wants to marry a prostitute by ridiculously saying, “Ma babbo non vedete come è bella, come potrebbe se non fosse pura? [But Dad, don’t you see how beautiful she is? How could she not be pure?]. The director exemplifies the dynamic of Pietro’s gradual blindness through love at various moments in the course of the film, both with close-ups from Pietro’s point of view and through the clever use of light and shadows. For example, the camera moves from Pietro’s early, intense gazes at his lover, to subsequent images that slip out of focus. Finally we see the scene of a room that is, symbolically, almost pitch black, where Pietro shows his lover the marriage license, while Ghisola, in tears, tells him she believes he will marry someone else.

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In the final scene, in which the protagonist finally learns the truth, the shot of the window shows the different attitude of the pair in relation to reality. Ghisola looks out from her room at the world and understands that Pietro has come to the brothel to find her while, as he walks along the corridor, he does not yet know how Ghisola will open his eyes. This game of glances culminates in the final resolution where words will not be the vehicle to open Pietro’s eyes, but rather the silent truth of the pain in his eyes as he sees that she is pregnant. There are many scenes in films that possess a lethal gaze. With its expressive power, this scene recalls the last moments of the film Au revoir les enfants by Luis Malle, where Julien, through a fleeting glance, inadvertently turns his Jewish friend Jean over to the Gestapo. Like Julien, Pietro also abandons his innocence with a similar gaze “pieno di pietà e di affetto” [full of pity and affection] (Tozzi, 97), that signals the end of his relationship with Ghisola. This end of innocence is visually registered through superimposed images, one of a twenty-year-old Pietro and another when he was thirteen years old, the age when he started to have feelings for Ghisola. This technique of superimposing images allows the director to render visually the internal collapse of the character, who loses his senses and falls to the ground, emotionally shattered. The caption that marks the end of the film reads, “Quando si riebbe dalla vertigine violenta che l’aveva abbattuto ai piedi di Ghisola, egli non l’amava più” [When he regained consciousness from the violent dizziness that threw him to the ground at Ghisola’s feet, he no longer loved her] (97), is taken from the last page of the novel and reconnects the images to the words, offering a tribute to Tozzi for his expressive power.17 In conclusion, while the book harbours an indecisiveness that is resolved only in the completion of Pietro’s destiny, as he is forced to accept his error due to uncontrollable passion, the film converts the tragic narrative into a more realistic story, even adding a humorous tone at times (for instance, in the representation of the the father-son disagreement). On the big screen Pietro and Ghisola’s love story is no longer delineated 17

This citation, direct proof of two contiguous and closely related languages, again demonstrates the dialectic relationship (which is uninterrupted) between the book and the film. Indeed, as Antoine Compagnon observes, citation in literature (and I would add in cinema too) tries to reproduce in writing (and consequently also in images) “una passione di lettura, di ritrovare l’istantanea, folgorante sollecitazione” [a passion for reading, in order to retrace its instantaneous, dazzling appeal] (Costa, 328). The appeal, in this case, is made explicit in the narrative climax—the day of reckoning for the protagonist—and in the symbolic reference to the original text.

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according to a victim/aggressor paradigm, where Ghisola represents the enchanting figure and Pietro the victim, but rather focuses on the passion that consumes them both, and which Pietro’s obtuseness will bring to an end. The moral of Lorenzetti’s fresco in the opening scene of the film finally becomes clear: with good government life is prosperous and with wise control of one’s emotions intense disappointments are avoided. Through a cognitive approach adopted within the dreamy dimension of adolescent love, Archibugi draws on Tozzi’s original text in order to display a theorem of the spirit: the problem of living with one’s eyes closed. Through cinema intended, in a Pasolinian sense, as “written language of reality”, the director incorporates the metaphor of visionarity (implicit to the seventh art) into her own cinema to showcase her reading of the world (with Tozzi’s text). Her camera can be likened to the sun of justice in Lorenzetti’s fresco, illuminating the most obscure zones of our soul. By reflecting self-critically on the metaphor of her cinema as a means of observing the surrounding world, the director makes her aim clear: to open the eyes of those who watch, just as Pietro must open his, including the director herself who opens her eyes with regard to her own cinematic style.

Works Cited Age (Incrocci, Agenore). 2004. Scriviamo un film. Manuale di sceneggiatura. Milan: Il Saggiatore. Airos, Letizia. 2003. Nel cinema di Francesca Archibugi ed i piccoligrandi attori. Oggi 7, November 9 http://www.oggi7.info/dettaglioguerra.asp?Art_Id=520. Aumont, Jacques. 1995. L’Oeil Interminable. Cinéma et Peinture. Paris: Séguier. Archibugi, Francesca. 1994. Con gli occhi chiusi. Rome: Skorpion Entertainment. Castelnuovo, Enrico. 1995. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Il Buon Governo. Milan: Electa. Chiarenza, Carlo. 1977. Autore, narratore e personaggio nella struttura narrativa di “Con gli occhi chiusi.” Paragone 330: 22—41. Costa, Antonio. 2002. Il cinema e le arti visive. Turin: Einaudi. Debenedetti, Giacomo. 1987. Il romanzo del Novecento. Milan: Garzanti. De Benedetti, Laura. 1999. Il tema dell’infanzia nel cinema di Francesca Archibugi. In La donna nel cinema italiano, ed. Tonia Caterina Riviello. Rome: Libreria Croce.

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Deleuze, Gilles. 1984. Cinema 1. L’immagine-movimento. Milan: Ubulibri. Fumagalli, Armando. 2004. I vestiti nuovi del narratore. L’adattamento tra letteratura e cinema. Milan: Il Castoro. Galvan, Alberto. 1996. Tozzi precursore fra esistenzialismo e Nouveau Roman. Esperienze Letterarie 21, 3: 97—108. Gieri, Manuela. 1995. Contemporary Italian Filmmaking: Strategies of Subversion. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Laviosa, Flavia. 2003. Themes and Motives in the Cinema of Francesca Archibugi. Kinema www. kinema.uwaterloo.ca/lavi1-032.htm —. 2003. Intervista con Francesca Archibugi: la famiglia postmoderna nella sua forma d’autore. In Incontri con il cinema italiano, ed. Antonio Vitti. Caltanissetta: S. Sciascia. Levantesi, Alessandra. 1998. Padri, figli e nipoti: Il cinema di Francesca Archibugi. In Schermi opachi. Il cinema italiano degli anni ’80, ed. Lino Micchichè. Venice: Marsilio. Marcus, Millicent. 1993. Filmmaking by the book. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Marrone, Gaetana ed. 1999. New Landscapes in Contemporary Italian Cinema. Annali d’Italianistica 17. Menga, Roberta. 1997. Francesca Archibugi. In Patchwork Due Geografia del nuovo cinema italiano, ed. Giulio Martini and Guglielmina Morelli. Milan: Il Castoro. Proto, Carola, ed. 1995. Francesca Archibugi. Rome: Dino Audino Editore. Starn, Randolf. 1994. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. The Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. New York: George Brazilier. Tozzi, Federigo. 1994. Con gli occhi chiusi. Rome: Newton Compton.

CRISTINA COMENCINI, NOVELIST AND FILMMAKER: FROM LA BESTIA NEL CUORE TO DON’T TELL1 FLAVIA LAVIOSA, WELLESLEY COLLEGE

Cristina Comencini’s (Rome 1956) reputable career in the mainstream Italian film industry and her recognized international success coincide with the rise of a generation of women filmmakers including her sister Francesca, Francesca Archibugi, Antonietta De Lillo, Fiorella Infascelli, Wilma Labate, and Roberta Torre, whose films represent forms of contemporary comedy, drama and melodrama. Cristina Comencini, with other directors such as Carlo Mazzacurati, Gabriele Muccino, Gabriele Salvatores, Silvio Soldini, Giuseppe Tornatore, and Paolo Virzì, belongs to what has been defined the “la generazione di mezzo” [the middle generation]2 of the Italian cinema. Daughter of the great director Luigi Comencini (1916-2007), Cristina3 started her career collaborating with her father as screenwriter for television programs. After eight years of intense apprenticeship, assisted by the best authors of the Italian cinema, she came to direction in 1988 with her debut film Zoo. Her filmmaking career continued with two major films The Amusements of Private Life (1990) and The End is Known (1992), the adaptation of Geoffrey Holiday Hall’s 1949 novel. Several years later, she directed an interview with Mario Monicelli in the collective documentary Directors Portraits: Series One (1996). Comencini’s first box-office success was Follow Your Heart (1995), the cinematographic adaptation of Susanna Tamaro’s 1994 homonymous best-seller, of which she also authored the screenplay with Roberta 1

All translations of Italian citations and interviews are mine. “La generazione di mezzo,” from a conversation with Vito Zagarrio who so defines the generation of filmmakers between the great masters and the emerging directors of the 2000s. Oxford University 20 January, 2006. 3 She made her debut as an actress in 1969, directed by her father in Giacomo Casanova Childhood and Adolescence. 2

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Mazzoni. The director’s production continued with two laudable comedies about the crisis of the family, Marriages (1998) and Free the Fish! (1999), the script of which she penned with Enzo Monteleone. Comencini later directed one episode of Another World is Possible4 (2001), a collective documentary reporting the outbreak of violence remembered as i fatti del G8 di Genova. She continued her career as filmmaker and scriptwriter with her daughter, Giulia Calenda, in The Best Day of My Life (2002), a film that explores the secrets and lies of a middle-class family. In addition to being a prolific script writer and filmmaker, Comencini is a well known novelist. Author of Le pagine strappate (1991), Passione di famiglia (1994), Il cappotto del turco (1997), Matriosca (2002), La bestia nel cuore (2004), and L’illusione del bene (2007), she writes stories with unforgettable female protagonists, where drama and comedy alternate. In 2005, Comencini earned international success and recognition with Don’t Tell,5 the cinematographic adaptation of her 2004 novel La bestia nel cuore.6 Later, in 2006 she made her stage debut directing her own play Due partite,7 followed in 2008 by her most recent film the comedy Black and White.8 Clearly, Comencini has had extensive experience as an expert scriptwriter, a productive filmmaker, and as a novelist. With regards to her dual artistic profession, the director declares in an interview with journalist Anna Maria Mori that she has always tried to avoid the contamination between the literary genre of her novels and the screenplay writing of her films.9 She explains, “non ho mai avuto voglia di mischiare le due carriere. L’idea di girare un film da un mio libro mi sembrava come rientrare dalla porta di servizio in una casa amata, in cui avevo vissuto in completa libertà 4

This is a project initiated and coordinated by Francesco Maselli. The film was awarded the following prizes at the 2005 Venice Film Festival: Award from the City of Rome for best film; the Volpi Cup to Giovanna Mezzogiorno for best leading actress; and the Wella Prize to Angela Finocchiaro for best supporting actress. The film was also awarded the UNICEF prize; and Young Cinema prize for best Italian film. The David of Donatello was awarded to Angela Finocchiaro for best supporting actress; the Silver Ribbon to Fabio Cianchetti for best cinematography; and the Silver Ribbon to Riccardo Tozzi, Marco Chimenz and Giovanni Stabilini for best producers. 6 Literal translation: The beast in the heart. 7 The theater piece is about two generations of women playing cards, and sharing their joys and anxieties over marital life. The play was awarded the prize I teatranti dell’anno in 2007. 8 Released in Italy on 11 January, 2008. 9 Interview with Cristina Comencini at the 27th Edition of the Incontri Internazionali Cinema e Donne. Florence 20 October, 2005. 5

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per due anni” [I never wanted to mix the two careers. The idea of directing a film from one of my books seemed to me like entering from the backdoor into a beloved home, where I had lived in complete freedom for two years] (Marciano et al. 2005, 5]. Comencini maintains that her novels “raccontano di solito avvenimenti che si svolgono in un arco di tempo molto lungo e c’è il rischio che al cinema, queste storie diventino dei ‘polpettoni” [are usually stories developing over a long period of time, and therefore there is often the risk that, if adapted into films, they may become rambling love stories] (RAI, 3). Nonetheless, when her husband and producer Riccardo Tozzi suggested the adaptation of La bestia nel cuore into a film,10 Comencini welcomed the opportunity because, she felt that “la storia del romanzo si presta [ad un adattamento filmico]: la trama è compatta nei luoghi e nel tempo, non ci sono attori da ringiovanire o invecchiare, c’è un’intensa atmosfera emotiva, e i personaggi agiscono soprattutto nel presente, che è il tempo preferito del cinema” [the novel lends itself (in being adapted into a film): the plot is compact in places and times, characters do not need to look younger or older, there is an intense emotional expectation, and characters act mostly in the present, which is cinema’s favorite time frame] (Marciano et al. 2005, 5). Moreover, she stated “I felt that my novel was like a non-shot book”11 and for this reason “Ho elaborato un libro visivo dal mio romanzo” [I managed to elaborate a visual book from the novel] (Marciano et al. 2005, 8). It is therefore Comencini’s fluid inspiration as mature writer and filmmaker that led her to work on the successful transposition of the story and the direction of her film. Discussion of a film based on a novel frequently leads to a methodology of comparison with its source, inevitably questions the notion of fidelity, and consequently arrives at a critical evaluation of the adaptation’s faithfulness to the book. Such a traditional and dominant comparative approach focuses on the different ways in which the adaptation expresses the same basic narrative as its original literary text. However, a novel and a film are such distinct aesthetic media that the equivalence between them cannot be based exclusively on principles of fidelity. All parameters of adaptation work around issues of narrative, performance, music, chronology, and locations in the specific audio-visual features of the medium. Therefore, a rigid novel-film comparison that does not take into account film language and cinematographic choices would

10 11

Interview with Cristina Comencini, Florence 2005. Interview with Cristina Comencini, Florence 2005.

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result in an inadequate starting point for the interpretation, analysis and evaluation of an adaptation. The narrative and aesthetic analysis of Comencini’s book and film in this essay will follow the theoretical principles of a medium-specific approach combined with those of a comparative paradigm, thus regarding adaptation as the artistic process of reconstructing meaning by transferring the narrative originally written in the novel into the visual medium of film. Further Comencini’s adaptation will be discussed by examining how the director’s re- interpretation of the book and her filmic re-writing of the story generate a new reading of the novel, and translate the source text into a cohesive visual and performative narrative. La bestia nel cuore is a novel, as Comencini states, that “si presta [ad un adattamento]” [lends itself in being adapted] (Marciano et al. 2005, 5) because of its structural features that mirror the organization of a screenplay with its simultaneity of narrative planes, swift transitions of points of view from the anonymous third person to a subjective narrator, fading shifts from major to minor characters, systematic switching from the main plot to interconnected subplots, cyclical transferring from real experiences to dreams, recurrent alternating true life with fictionalized stories, and frequent changing from interior dialogues to letter narration. The writing style, unequivocally direct, plain and concise, conveys a sense of disquieting immediacy and harsh realism. The text is characterized by minimal descriptive narratives, while reaching frightening depth in the characters’ psychology. The tone is dramatic and intimate, and at times ironic. The language in dialogues, dreams, and introspective conversations is very informal and strikingly explicit. The secrets that sometimes roam deep within even the most seemingly normal lives are the subject of the novel La bestia nel cuore and subsequent film Don’t Tell,12 which tackle complex topics such as a violated childhood. A few lines in a newspaper article about an adult brother and sister, coming to terms with painful events in their childhood,13 caught Comencini’s attention. The director was impressed by how these siblings, in talking about a terrible incident in the past, spoke with such “detachment as though they had recovered” and she “thought it would be a good idea to write about suffering as a form of knowledge, not just of pain, something you must know about yourself before you can love 12 The film was nominated for the 2006 Academy Award for the 78th Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. 13 The book dedication and the film’s opening scene present the note: “To D. [Daniele] and S. [Sabina] whom I never met, but whose story I read in the newspaper.”

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someone” (Honeycutt 2006). The title La bestia nel cuore, as Comencini explains, refers “alla parte istintiva, alla sfera non educata che governa i nostri desideri più intimi e che, se ben addomesticata, è in grado di indirizzare al meglio le nostre scelte. Tuttavia, a volte, non si riesce a tenerla a freno e il risultato è un’esplosione di dolore” [To the instinct side of the human nature, that particular and uncontrolled sphere that rules our most intimate desires and that, if guided, can well direct our choices. However, sometimes, we cannot keep it under control and the result is an explosion of pain] (Montini 2005, 17). The director also states that “la seduzione del bambino appartiene all’umanità, nel bene e nel male. Sta all’individuo adulto riconoscere certe pulsioni segrete, per allontanarsene prima di provocare danni irrimediabili” [Attraction to the child is part of human nature in good and bad. It is the individual’s responsibility to recognize certain secret impulses and to avoid them before causing irreparable damages] (Anselmi 2005, 31). The story is a family drama around the themes of sexual molestation, the horror of pedophilia, the psychological damage of childhood incest as manifested in trauma-shaped perceptions and behaviors, and lifelong shame. Comencini explores the shadows of ordinary life, the excesses of parental love and attraction, the darkness of desire and abuse, with a brother and sister who, together, take “un cammino doloroso verso la verità che avvicina la normalità all’orrore” [a painful journey towards the truth that brings normality closer to horror].14 The narrative about the terrible secrets that can be hidden between the walls of an apparently irreproachable middle-class family focuses on the mesmerizing story of a young woman’s exploration into her childhood, which occurs spontaneously with the discovery of her pregnancy. Starting with the recurrence of threatening memories and through conversations with her brother, she unveils betrayals and lies in her family, and ultimately confronts personal demons long hidden beneath the surface of her psyche. The book is introduced by a citation from Aeschylus’ Coefore, “Perché i figli salvano e tengono vivo il nome dei morti, come i sugheri, reggendo la rete, preservano il filo di lino dal fondo del mare” [Because the children save and hold alive the names of the dead, like corks, holding the net, preserving the flax thread from the bottom of the sea] (Comencini 2004, 9). The Dead, Corks, Net, and Sea become the key elements chosen by the author to title the clusters of chapters of her book. The lives of the dead parents float in the protagonists’ dreams, like corks the characters’ nightmares surface, while nets capture memories and keep hidden secrets, 14

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and the sea gives birth to a new child. Thematic allusions, allegorical imagery, and descriptive references to Greek tragedy are recurrent and cyclical in the novel,15 thus suggesting moral metaphors throughout the literary narrative. Sabina, the protagonist, dubs TV films in Italy’s thriving dubbing industry, has a regular life, and is satisfied with her job. The novel’s opening page starts with the lines of the brief and brutal dialogue between a rapist and a young woman jogging in a park from an American movie that Sabina is dubbing for a television show. Followed by technical comments from the producer and sound editor in the television studio, the violent episode leaves the reader with alarming questions as to the development of the story. The writer takes a pause from the unsettling introduction and proceeds to introduce Sabina’s partner, Franco, a handsome up-and-coming stage actor, who, to ease some of their financial burden, reluctantly takes a higher-paying job playing a doctor on a television series. Sabina and Franco live together, are very much in love, and seemingly without worries. Unlike the book, the film’s first sequence reconnects Sabina to her deceased parents, thus giving a sense of finality to her family life. Set in the Verano cemetery in Rome, the scene introduces the protagonist wandering through the quiet and deserted alleys of the cemetery, and overseeing the transfer of her parents’ bodies. Following these scenes, the director establishes an emotional parallel between the burial arrangements and the protagonists’ family house. The film narrative shifts to an unreal image of a dimly lit, abandoned interior covered with dust, and concealing the stolen childhood of Sabina and her older brother Daniele. Lingering shots of the study with books on the shelves and scattered open books on the desk, the living room with an unfinished knitted scarf left on the armchair, the kitchen, the children’s rooms, and the parents’ bedroom with family photos, lead the spectator through what is screened as the buried memory of a home. Like an allegorical eye into a frozen past, the panning 15 Daniele and Sabina’s father is a professor of Greek and Latin literatures; Daniele and Sabina have shared a passion for Homer since their childhood; and Daniele is a Classics professor at the University of Virginia. Franco recites a section of Aeschylus’ Coefere for his TV audition; Emilia is compared to Penelope for weaving while waiting for Sabina’s visits; Emilia remembers Sabina’s father saying that Sabina and Emilia are two ancient Roman names; and history is also referenced, as Sabina does not remember the house of her childhood, just like Carthage, “Carthago delenda est” [Carthage must be destroyed] the Latin phrase, a clarion call in the Roman Republic, repeatedly stated by Senator Marcus Cato, in the latter years of the Punic War III, 149-146 B.C.

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camera reads each room like the pages of a book, and tells the story starting from the characters’ shared domestic space. A melancholic violin playing a brooding tune becomes distinctly louder and unsettling. This intense melody accompanies all subsequent ‘house’ scenes in the film. Sabina’s dubbing of the rape scene in the film is cinematographically linked to the ‘house’ sequence. The film’s visually, acoustically and verbally dramatic transposition of the similarly distressing scene in the novel is focused on Sabina’s professionally acted pain and simulated terror in the dubbed scene, thus foreshadowing the imminent realization of her own experiences of sexual abuse. Though initially this episode seems to have little resonance, it suddenly triggers disturbing dreams both in the book and the film. These nightmares worry Sabina as she feels flooded by frightening memories surfacing from her childhood. Finding herself pregnant, the impetus for the disturbing rape scene’s psychic integration, opens a disquieting window onto her own inner life, while she senses that something more troubling is about to be revealed. In the novel, Daniele and Sabina’s drama is metaphorically announced through the classical literary connection with Orestes and Electra, a brother and sister united by blood shed both in war and within their family.16 “I morti uccidono i vivi” [The dead kill the living] says the servant in Aeschylus’ tragedy (Comencini 2004, 41). Comencini explains that classical authors had managed to find a way to talk about pedophilia, L’uomo greco dialogava con le proprie debolezze, non supponeva mai di conoscerle completamente e di poterle governare, sentiva di essere “agito” da forze superiori alla propria volontà. In questo a me appare oggi molto moderno, più di noi che abbiamo l’illusione di avere rinchiuso la nostra bestia per sempre. The Greek were able to discuss their weaknesses, did not assume to know them completely, nor were they able to control them, but they were aware of the fact that they were being controlled by forces stronger than their own will. In this way they seem to be very modern, more than we are today, because, unlike them, we think that we have succeeded in locking in our beast forever.17

16

Their first sister, Iphigenia, was sacrificed by their father, Agamemnon, in order to win the war; then the father was killed by the mother, Clytemnestra, to vindicate their daughter. Eventually Orestes returned home to vindicate his father’s death by killing both his mother and her lover Aegisthus. 17 www.feltrinelli.it/SchedaTesti 4/22/2004.

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The psychological and philosophical depth and intensity of classical citations and legendary metaphors permeate the narrative texture of Comencini’s novel, thus interweaving the myths of Greek tragedy with the protagonists of her contemporary drama. The author elaborates a complex father, portraying him as a cultured man,18 a high school professor of classics,19 and a present parent, who engages in philosophical discussions with his son. Proud of his child Daniele, this austere, stern and kind father,20 monitors his studies and inspires his passion for Greek classics, but he never smiles or touches his son.21 Daniele profoundly respects him for his intellectual knowledge and academic interests, is willing to live up to his expectations, but is also silently resentful for succumbing to his demands during his night time visits. Comencini contrasts this authoritative and vigilant day time parental figure with the weak, sick man at night, whose love for his children exceeds the societal boundaries of morally accepted paternal love. The emotional representation of the father in the novel, framed within a philosophical analysis drawn from the mythical characters of Greek tragedy, is a sensitive attempt to understand the parent’s psychopathology, rather than solely to condemn his behavior. Such ancient references and erudite elements, however, are completely absent in the film. The directorial choice to focus on the representation of the modern human tragedy, leaving the elegance of classical themes and allegories to 18

The father in the novel writes a book on “la storia della relazione tra un professore e una sua allieva. Un misto di Lolita e dell’Angelo azzurro” [the love story between a professor and a female student, something between Lolita and Angelo azzurro] (Comencini 2004, 118). This theme is linked to three similar situations in the novel: Maria’s husband falls in love with his teenage daughter’s classmate; Sabina, as a young student, had a brief relationship with an older English professor at the University of Oxford; and Thomas Jefferson at age fortyfour, after his wife’s death, had a long relationship with a black fourteen-year-old slave with whom he had five children. 19 When asked why she modified the role of the father in the film, Comencini answered, “the father’s high level of culture and knowledge is cinematographically suggested by the presence of shelves loaded with books in the house scenes, while the choice to portray the parents as voiceless characters in Sabina’s dream sequences is aesthetic and narrative. There are elements that can be expressed fully in a novel, but cannot be reproduced exactly in the same way in cinematic language.” Interview with Cristina Comencini, Florence 2005. 20 In the film Emilia defines Sabina’s father “severo, non ride mai, ma è gentile” [stern, he never smiles, but he is kind] (Marciano 2005, 37). 21 Daniele thinks that this behavior is normal because “tra uomini non ci si tocca” [Men do not touch each other] (Comencini 2004, 164).

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literature, becomes inevitable and necessary in rendering the story more visually fluid. In the film, the father is repeatedly presented as a threatening ghost in Sabina’s nightmares, as a helpless pervert, and an incestuous pedophile in Daniele’s confession and flashbacks, who at night implores his children’s attention, begs for their love, and perpetrates sexual abuse first on his son, later on his daughter. Such recurrent portrayals intensify the horrific parent-children relational routine, while relegating his presence to the obscurity of the night—a metaphorical space and time for the sinister and maze-like complexity of the human psyche. In the novel the pluridimensionality of the father’s function encompasses his multiple educational roles, love for his children, responsibility and influence on their up-bringing. In the cinematic version, however, his split personality and unsettling day versus night duality is less overt, and the director chooses to omit the father’s human side, his emotional bond with his children, and intellectual connection with Daniele. In focusing exclusively on the father’s character as a haunting bedtime figure, the director succeeds in dramatizing his presence and adding dimension to the film via the inaccessible meanders of his mind, but inevitably she diminishes his complex parental role, lessens the degree of conflict in the father’s psyche and troubling deviance in his relation with Daniele and Sabina. This reduction of complexity, however, allows for the primacy of Comencini’s re-vision, which emphasizes the perspective of the victims in the story. In the book and in the film Sabina’s memory is blind—she cannot remember her own home, nor can she see through her past, as she has subconsciously removed her trauma, and anything connected with her childhood. Comencini explains that one night Sabina is “hit by a dream as by a revelation. Only when she unveils the truth, she can start again.”22 Her dream becomes a fruitful thought, the ultimate source of her awareness. Further, the director renders Sabina’s dreams in exceedingly descriptive and graphic language in the novel and in equally striking images in the film. One of the novel’s most disturbing moments is Sabina’s first nightmare where she experiences con-fused visions of violence drawn from the dubbed rape scene and images of her father’s sexual molestation, resulting in finding both herself and him together in her parents’ bed and inexplicably covered in wet sheets. Similarly, the film’s most arresting and distressing instance occurs when the approach of Sabina’s pajama-clad father becomes a child’s eye 22 Press conference with Cristina Comencini at the 62nd Venice Film Festival. Lido, 8 September, 2005.

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view of his crotch, his open fly, and the shadowy and terrifying mysteries therein, a doorway into her repressed memory of abuse. In subsequent nightmares, Sabina watches herself as a child being pulled into this subconscious threshold. In horror, she recoils, unable to scream for help, and unsure of the image’s meaning. Deborah Young, in her review of the film, finds it striking “how directly Comencini approaches her characters’ psychology. She brooks no talk of Oedipal complexes and depicts no moral ambiguity in child abuse—only severe psychological damage that lasts a lifetime” (2005, 66). Therefore, it can be argued that no concessions are made, and no psychological intricacy is acknowledged in the drama. The director addresses the theme of incest exclusively from the abused children’s perspective, thus avoiding in her film’s narrative choices any attempt to address questions of ethical, psychopathological, and affective struggle pertaining to the father’s disturbing behavior. Moreover, whereas in the novel Comencini gives the dead parents a voice in the nightmare scenes, the dialogues between Daniele and Sabina, and in the letter writing, her aesthetic decision to portray voiceless parents in the film posits questions of moral blame against the father and against the mother for her disquieting acquiescent complicity. The spectator hears the mother’s “voice” only through Daniele’s painful and liberating confession to Sabina, when he explains to his sister that their mother justified her husband’s actions as “un vizio. […] È malato. Lui è debole […] Non devi dirlo a nessuno, perché sono cose che succedono, siamo una famiglia” [a vice. (…) He is sick. Weak. (…) Don’t tell anyone, these are things that happen, we are a family] (Marciano et al. 2005, 96). While in the novel Sabina and Daniele’s house is never mentioned, it has a profound psychological dimension in the film that furthers the singular perspective of the victims. Reminiscent of a childhood place, their home is persistent in Sabina’s nightmares and Daniele’s memories. Defined as a place of despair, it is purposefully represented as an inner labyrinth without windows, consistently perceived as a hidden world of secrets, and shown as a gateway to traumatic past experiences. As Sabina begins unraveling the truth behind her nightmares, the memory of the topography of the house in her periodic dreams alters. The rooms and hallways take new directions in all subsequent scenes, as this domestic locus symbolizes the space of the soul wrenching moments of pain and abuse. This visual maze-like effect conveys a dramatic sense of confusion in the narrow halls, and fear in the unsafe, yet familiar, rooms. The recurrence of the “house” scenes reinforces its central symbolism of a place of imprisoned demons.

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Comencini punctuates the film’s story with periodic and revealing nightmares set in the house of the protagonists’ childhood. She chooses this narrative device to enter the subconscious, and to avoid the more conventional use of flashbacks. The director explains that, when shooting the house of the nightmares, it is “un ambiente del tutto irreale perché a seconda dei ricordi, la casa prende forme diverse: spariscono i corridoi, le stanze cambiano posizione, in una geografia che non ha nulla di realistico ed è del tutto emotiva, e […] per dare l’impressione di un universo psicologico.” [The setting was completely unreal because, each time a new piece of memory was added, the house took new forms: the corridors disappeared, the rooms changed position, creating an unrealistic topography because the atmosphere was meant to be totally emotional, and (…) to give the impression of a psychological universe] (RAI 3—4) The “house”, with its interiors and identity as a site of the past, is relegated to the nightmare sequences; casting back the spectator’s gaze, it inflicts a sense of horror and anguish. A visual device, cinematographically built and rebuilt, to give birth to the truth, the ‘house’ becomes the source of awareness for Sabina, who chooses to move forward in her life, knowing that what lies behind her is flawed and obtrusive. Both the reader and the spectator are also introduced to Franco, Sabina’s partner. A full chapter is devoted to present him early in the book, while the relationship between the young couple in the film is condensed in scenes expressing their love, precarious professional lives as actors, and intense physical and emotional connection. An entire chapter of the book is also dedicated to Sabina’s friend, Emilia, and her life style as a blind single woman. The writer explores her secret and unrequited love for Sabina, her thoughts and imaginary ideas while she lives by herself waiting for her friend’s regular visits. In the film the director conveys all this information in a very short time, without loosing the depth of the character Emilia. Her apartment is dimly lit. The spectator hears the noise of a loom. Emilia nervously turns a radio-clock on, starts getting ready, puts make up on, and organizes her place, as if she were going to receive a visit from her lover. In the novel, Sabina is already in Emilia’s apartment reading a book to her. In the novel during her periodic visits, Sabina reads aloud to Emilia chapters of a novel, Il viaggio di Carla (Carla’s Journey), thus establishing one more level of communication between the women. The novel-within-the-novel element is completely omitted in the film, where the director instead, inserts a regular and intimate letter reading to connect characters, establish a narrative thread across times and places, and intertwine their different stories.

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In the film, Comencini substitutes visual ideas for words, groups’ episodes, and changes some narrative points, like the revelation of truth during Sabina’s trip to spend the Christmas holidays with her brother Daniele and his young family. The long and intimate scene with Daniele, a classics professor at the University of Virginia in Charlotsville, does not just take place in his house like in the book, but is prepared for by the expositional exchange between Sabina and Ann, Daniels’s wife during New Year’s Eve. Day after day, Daniele ignores and avoids his sister, takes her along with his wife and children to the countryside, which is as cold as their relationship. Sabina is unsure about her doubts, and she starts thinking that her dreams mean nothing, hoping that they are only the product of her imagination. When at New Year’s Eve Sabina sees Daniele playing with his children, and setting off fireworks in the snowy yard, she is surprised by his change, as he is usually quiet, methodical and calm. Now he is exploding fireworks with a new found fury, revealing repressed aggression that she did not know about. While Sabina stares at him in disbelief through the window, Daniele’s wife, who has had too many drinks, joins her, tries to be nice to Sabina, and says that she wants to toast to the baby, who will help her come out of the nightmare. Sabina wonders, which nightmare? She asks how she knows, then she watches as Anne looks at Daniele who, like a mad man, seems to set the house on fire, and sees deep compassion in her face. Only then does Sabina understand. She runs outside in the cold yard, reaches her brother, hits him, until he falls down, and then he tries to calm her. With these scenes the spectator knows that Daniele will tell her what happened in their home many years ago. Daniele’s recollection of what he experienced as a child spans over a six-page long excruciating confession in the book. His memories resurface with full force as the writer elaborates on his need for closure and moral forgiveness. Daniele’s suffering is narrated in a profoundly touching tone, and expressed through dramatic moments of disclosure: È successo, non proprio tutte le sere, dai cinque agli otto anni. Ad un certo punto della notte, sentivo i suoi passi nel corridoio. Mettevo la testa sotto il cuscino per non sentirli, speravo si fermassero, che ci ripensasse. Ma apriva sempre la porta, stava fermo, e dopo qualche secondo diceva “Daniele vieni”, con una voce supplichevole. La sua voce era diversa da quella del giorno. Di giorno era imperativa, sicura, sempre leggermente enfatica. Di notte era quella di un bambino lamentoso, tremante di paura... (Comencini 2004, 165). It happened, not every night, since I was five and until I was eight-years old. At a certain time during the night, I heard his steps in the hall. I used to put my head under the pillow so that I could not hear his steps. I hoped

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they would stop, and after a few seconds he used to say “Daniele come”, with an imploring voice. His voice was different from the one in the day time. During the day it was imperative, strong, and always lightly emphatic. At night it was like the voice of a lamenting child, trembling of fear…

The intimacy of Daniele’s confession is cinematographically attained in a scene set in the early hours of New Year’s Day, after all the guests have left and while his wife and children are sleeping. In contrast with other night sequences in the childhood house, all marked by a sense of psychological claustrophobia that encroached on the characters, the quiet time Daniele spends with Sabina in the softly lit, white walled, and open kitchen of his house allows his story to convey the depth of his unresolved trauma. He is finally ready to recall his memories and express his feelings about what happened. He shares with his sister the full reality of his trauma and how the residues of those experiences have shaped his adult life. Daniele openly manifests his confusion between normalcy and abuse in a parental-filial love relationship, recognizes the ambiguity of the lovehatred relationship with the father while shifting the responsibility for the abuse from the father to himself and back to the parent. In addition to feelings of self-blame, Daniele explains his confused perception of docility and obedience versus resistance and rebellion as a child, while acknowledging the mystification of a father-son relationship based on submission and respect in the power-unbalance and interactional manipulative nature of sexual abuse. Daniele also declares the torturing coexistence of self-hate and shame, guilt and anger, admits his helplessness, dis-empowerment as well as disconnection from himself and his children. He finally seeks reconciliation, comprehension of his father’s desires and acceptance for his perverse behavior in order to normalize his own life as a survivor of abuse. This intense scene in Daniele’s kitchen gives visual and emotional centrality to the two siblings. Shame and blame, secrecy and resentment emerge in the painful reenactment of past episodes of abuse. The director conveys Daniele’s embarrassment and reticence, fear of distressing his sister and reluctance to bring back hurtful family stories by positioning him standing on the left side of the frame, dressed in a formal dark jacket, and facing the window, looking away from his sister and towards the darkness of the night while his back is to the camera. On the other hand, Sabina’s readiness to know and understand the truth is expressed in her wearing a white sweater while sitting at the table on the right hand side of the frame, and openly facing the camera and projected towards the light source. She quietly listens to her brother while becoming increasingly

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scared and worried, and feeling numbed as Daniele unravels their dreadful family past. Daniele’s monologue in the film is quite detailed and painful, Per tanto tempo da bambino non mi sono reso conto di nulla. Capitava quasi tutte le notti … eppure mi sembrava normale. E questa cosa è stata la più difficile da vincere con la terapia. L’idea della mia … mansuetudine. Cioè io pensavo che fosse normale, capisci? Durante il giorno lui voleva sapere della scuola, mi chiedeva di andargli a comprare le sigarette, veniva a parlare con i maestri... Era normale, paterno. Non mi tocccava mai. Scusa ma è proprio questo che … Io … io ancora non ce la faccio a toccare i miei figli. Non riesco neanche ad abbracciarli… Di giorno aveva un tono autorevole, severo. Ma di notte si trasformava. Aveva questa voce... come quella di un bambino lamentoso, pieno di paura…. Ma io non piango per me. Piango per quell bambino là, perché mi fa una pena terribile. Penso a lui che sente quella voce supplichevole, e lui ubbidiente si alza, lo segue, fa quello che l’altro gli chiede. Lo fa per calmarlo, per farlo star bene. Perché quell bambino ha imparato che ai genitori si ubbidisce sempre e comunque... (Marciano et al. 2005, 92—94). For a long time as a child I was not aware of anything. It happened almost every night… and yet it seemed normal. And this has been the most difficult part to overcome during the therapy…The idea of my submissiveness. In other words, I thought that it was normal, do you understand? During the day he wanted to know about school, asked me to go and buy him cigarettes, came to talk to my professors… He was normal, paternal. He never touched me… I am sorry but this is precisely the reason why I… I … am not able to touch my children. I cannot even hug them… In the day time he had an authoritative and severe tone, but at night he changed… he had a voice like a plaintive, fearful child. … I am not crying for myself. I cry for that child because I feel pity for him. I think that he hears that imploring voice, and he obediently gets up, follows him and does what the other asks him to do. He does it to calm him down, to make him feel good. Because that child does not know what those gestures mean, but he obeys because he has learnt that one always and anyways obeys his parents.

During this explicit confession, Daniele weeps and seeks support by sitting next to his sister. While disclosing repulsion and declaring the need for revenge for what had tormented his life as a result of his father’s nightly visits to his bedroom, his intense explosion of emotions becomes a voiceover narration of graphic and descriptive flashbacks of their father’s regular nightly requests, Daniele’s threats to kill him and protests against to his mother in the desperate attempt to protect Sabina from their father’s molestation, while their mother did nothing to prevent it.

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In the film and in the book Daniele also explains to Sabina that many years later, their father, while terminally ill and bed-ridden in the hospital, confessed to him that he had abused Sabina twice. At this point Daniele, in some ways like Orestes, angered by this last hurtful admission of guilt and need for redemption through confession, and feeling responsible for having failed to protect Sabina, decided to vindicate her and the child in himself. After taking care of their sick father in the hospital one night, he asked the nurse for a stronger dose of morphine, which predictably ended their father’s life. Later, in the novel Daniele confesses to his sister, “Io l’ho ucciso per te” [I killed him for you] (Comencini 2004, 169), while in the film the admission of patricide is stated implicitly as a result of the lethal effect of the overdose of morphine, “è andato in coma subito, è morto in poche ore” [he went into coma very quickly, and after a few hours he died] (Marciano et al. 2005, 98). Another crucial moment in the novel is Sabina’s labor, narrated in a stream of consciousness style where reality, dreams, impressions, and fears are populated with confused memories of characters from her family and images of real passengers on the train. These people’s faces and actions, their conversations with Sabina, and her own thoughts overlap in a blurred and surreal experience exasperated by the discomfort of the unbearable mid-August heat and her intensifying labor. This is another climatic scene in the film where the director resorts to a number of techniques to render visually the complexity of Sabina’s pain, her subsequent cathartic rebirth, and the delivery of her child. In mid-summer, Sabina and Franco, Emilia and Maria, and the TV director Andrea Negri decide to take a vacation in the South.23 A very pregnant Sabina suddenly, and without notice, decides to leave her friends to get back to Rome. While traveling on a train she gets into labor. The unexpected pain scares her inducing her mind to flash from the long and deserted train car to the narrow hallways of her childhood house where she tries to come to terms with her family demons. During a series of frantic attempts to seek help on the train, she puts her hand on the train window and is reconnected to the past, where as a child she pushes with her small hand the glass panels of the doorways in her parents’ house. Sabina’s screaming, calling her mother, looking for Daniele, and running towards her father while approaching the delivery of the baby, are juxtaposed with spinning high angle shots of a lonely Sabina cowered helplessly in pain on the train floor. In this metaphorical journey to the past and through labor she, processes her last visit to her family memories. As her water breaks, a 23

The scenes are shot in Spongano, a small town in the Salento region.

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violent and sudden wave inundates the childhood house, first flooding the kitchen where her indifferent mother is ironing, then submerging Daniele quietly sleeping in his bedroom, and finally engulfing her father embracing her in his study. In her attempt to reconcile with her past, Sabina is able to sink the horrors when her family members are completely submerged and their demons drowned.24 Moreover, this scene reconnects the film to Aeschylus’ Coefore the opening quote in the book “perché i figli salvano e tengono vivo il nome dei morti, come i sugheri, reggendo la rete, preservano il filo di lino dal fondo del mare,” [because the children save and hold alive the names of the dead, like corks, holding the net, preserving the flax thread from the bottom of the sea] (Comencini 2004, 9) thus establishing a circular and unifying motif between the narrative threads of the literary and the cinematographic texts. With regard to Daniele’s psyche, several parallel scenes reveal idiosyncrasy in his parental love in the film. Upon her arrival in the United States, Sabina notices that her brother is unable to hug her at the airport, has trouble being affectionate with his family, and is terrified by the possibility of establishing warm, physical contact with his own children. As Comencini explains, Daniele is frightened because he “scopr[e] la vicinanza del [suo] comportamento a quello che sembrava solo il vizio di un uomo malato. Il passaggio dalle parole scambiate tra due esseri umani, alla carezza, alla nudità, al sesso, diventa di colpo ambiguo, incontrollabile, inconoscibile” [discover(s) the similarity of (his) behavior to the one that looked like the perversion of a sick man. The step between the exchanges of words to the caress, nudity, sex, becomes suddenly ambiguous, incontrollable, unknown]. 25 The director counterbalances the distressing moments when Daniele seemed to be afraid to touch his children, with Daniele’s gesture of affection while playing with one of his sons in the closing scene. This restored expression of free and tender love between parent and child suggests a possible resolution and attempted healing from the revisited tragedies of the past. Against these terrifying images and stories, Comencini gives hope to the two couples that try to raise their own families, Daniele with his American wife and two children, and Sabina with Franco and their newly born son, whom they name Daniele. At the end of his confession in the novel, Daniele reassures Sabina saying, “Lascia dormire i morti e i sogni su di loro” [Let the dead sleep and the dreams over them] (Comencini 2004, 122). In the film, he writes a letter to his sister, “Una cicatrice è un 24

This scene was cut when the film was released. It was then restored in the DVD version of the film. 25 www.feltrinelli.it/SchedaTesti 4/22/2004.

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segno indelebile, non una malattia. La vita, quello che pensavamo ci avessero tolto, possiamo riprendercela, anche se per farlo abbiamo dovuto cancellare per sempre il ricordo dei bambini che eravamo” [A scar is an indelible sign, but not a disease. Life, what we thought they had taken away from us, we can take it back, even though, in order to do so, we had to erase forever the memory of the children in us] (Marciano et al. 2005, 127). Daniele and Sabina’s conversations represent a psychological rite of passage from the pain of their childhood to the dawning awareness of their adulthood as new, healing parents. When questions as to whether Comencini felt more satisfied with the book or the film, the director replied that “the ending of the film, with Daniele’s moving letter, is more effective, while the book is more powerful for its characters’ profound psychological analysis.”26 Comencini’s dramaturgy in La bestia nel cuore echoes and mirrors, questions and attempts to resolve the dramas and conflicts of her characters’ family events, while Don’t Tell, as the title of the film suggests, sets the tone for the pressing need to cry the truth, and free oneself from the pain of parental abuse. Comencini’s versatile literary and screen writing as well as prolific filmmaking have given rise to the cinematographic adaptation of her own best-seller thus producing an internationally acclaimed film. The director admits that, when working on adaptations, she has always experienced that “Per ridare l’atmosfera del libro, il clima, le relazioni tra i personaggi, essere fedele allo scrittore, come si sa, devi essere pronto a tradirlo. Questa volta, dato che il libro è mio, ho dovuto tentare di tradire me stessa” [In order to reproduce the atmosphere of the book, the climate, the relationships among the characters, to be faithful to the writer, as we all know, one has to be willing to betray him. This time, since the novel was my own, I had to try to betray myself] (Marciano et al. 2005, 5—6). As Comencini states, rendering of ‘faithfulness’ to the source text can be attained when the director is “willing to betray” the novelist. Her own ‘betrayal’, as illustrated in the several examples selected for this discussion, can be best described as the novel-to-film results concerning what she intended to achieve in terms of the transferal of a text from one medium to the other. The bi-textual analysis of the author’s works in this essay rests upon the relevant developments and changes applied by the director in the process of her adaptation. The unique languages and conventions of a novel and film generate distinct forms of artistic expression—consequently, 26

Interview with Comencini, Florence 2005.

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the comparison of Comencini’s book with her cinematographic transposition does not focus on the criterion of absolute fidelity between the two media. The register of her film is such that it is not meant to be either ‘faithful’ or ‘unfaithful’ to the novel. Comencini’s adaptation embraces the literariness of her book in the referential aspects of the film, while making allusions to the psychological and societal tropes of the story line. Therefore, the director inflects her own adaptation with a series of questions and themes expressed in the novel, and she seeks further elements within the source text around the notions of misdirected parental love and children’s psychological wounds. The fruitful exercise of a combined medium-specific and comparative analysis inevitably involves also a better understanding or a change in the interpretation of the source as it allows the critic to go back to the novel after studying its adaptation. The translation of a novel into a film differs from writing literature because the story in the film is elaborated around components that can be rendered into visual representations of the novel’s action. In fact, the interplay between the novel and the film in the adaptation process leads to a re-writing of the text which comprises the specific technical and stylistic characteristics of the medium film. In conclusion, similarities and variations are parameters constantly shifting as creative approaches to adaptation are also greatly influenced by a number of circumstances connected with films’ “production, release and critical reception […] perhaps more so than the body of critical theory in the field has suggested” (Clayton 2007, 132). The discussion then in this essay has concentrated on how and why adaptation happens, in order to assess the fluid and dynamic re-interpretation of the novel La bestia nel cuore in the film Don’t Tell. Dedicated to Linda Levine

Works Cited Anselmi, Michele. 2005. “La bestia nel cuore” supera la prova-fischi. Il Giornale, September 9: 31. Clayton, Sue. 2007. Visual and Performative Elements in Screen Adaptation: a Film-Maker’s Perspective. Journal of Media Practice 8, 2: 129—146. Comencini, Cristina. 2004. La bestia nel cuore. Milan: Feltrinelli. Honeycutt, Kirk. 2006. Comencini. The Hollywood Reporter. March 6 web.lexis-nexis.com.luna.wellesley.edu/universe/document 10/30/2006.

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Marciano, Francesca, Giulia Calende and Cristina Comencini. 2005. La bestia nel cuore. Venice: Marsilio. Montini, Franco. 2005. Ritorno alla casa dell’infanzia. Vivil Cinema 4: 16—17. RAI Cinema and Cattleya Press Release. 2005. La Bestia nel Cuore un film di Cristina Comencini. Venice: Festival del Film di Venezia. Young, D. 2005. Don’t Tell. Variety, September 19: 66.

OF BODY AND SOUL: FROM PIRANDELLO TO THE TAVIANI BROTHERS. LITERATURE, THEATRE AND CINEMA1 MANUELA GIERI, UNIVERSITY OF BASILICATA

The eye whereby the beauty of the world is reflected by beholders is of such excellence that whoso consents to its loss deprives himself of the representation of all the works of nature, because we can see these things owing to our eyes the soul is content to stay imprisoned in the human body; for through the eyes all the various things of nature are represented to the soul —Leonardo da Vinci, Paragone Impara a guardare le cose con gli occhi di quelli che non le vedono più. Ne proverai dolore, certo. Ma quel dolore te le renderà più sacre e più belle… Forse è solo per dirti questo che ti ho fatto venire fin qua. Learn to look at things with the eyes of those who no longer see them. This will cause you pain, certainly. But that pain will make those things more sacred and more beautiful to you… Perhaps it was just to tell you this that I made you come here

With these words Luigi Pirandello’s mother ends an intense conversation with her son which takes place in the final scene of Kaos, the film directed by the Taviani brothers in 1983-84, and the work with which 1

This essay was first published in Lauretta, Enzo, ed. 2007. La novella di Pirandello. Dramma film musica fumetto. Pesaro: Metauro, Pesaro: 107—120. The book featured the proceedings of a conference held in Agrigento, at the Centro Nazionale Studi Pirandelliani [National Centre for Pirandello Studies] in December 2007.

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the film-makers began, I believe, their very personal, intense and intimate dialogue with the Sicilian writer. They initiated this particular dialogue not by choosing Pirandello’s best known, most celebrated and cited works, i.e. his great plays and novels, but by deliberately identifying in his short stories—particularly those linked to the Sicilian peasant culture—a fertile ground on which to build the personal overcoming of the first stage of their artistic, cultural and even ideological development. Significantly, in abandoning that stage of their development, decidedly more marked by political and ideological fervor, and defined by many as “cinema of utopia,” the Taviani brothers chose to embrace Luigi Pirandello, one of the greatest exponents of the bourgeois Weltanschauung as it developed in nineteenth century Italy and Europe.2 Pirandello is an author who, amongst other things, extensively pondered over the role and condition of the bourgeoisie, over the role and condition of its stories as well as its many representations—artistic, social, cultural, and so on. Not only did he reflect on these matters, but he also used these various modes of representation and story-telling, which eventually led one to overcome nineteenth century sensibility, and create the practice and theory which were to define theatrical and literary Modernism. In his constant search for new and original dramatic and narrative strategies, Luigi Pirandello tackled some of the issues that would become crucial as artistic Modernism sought to define itself, such as the nature of the new subject in its relationship with reality; the relationship between illusion (fiction) and reality; the different roles held by author, character and reader/spectator during the process of artistic creation; as well as the complex nature of both “narrativity” and “theatrality.”3 Not incidentally, 2

Many critics have written about the Taviani brothers’ cinema and this film in particular. Here I would like to mention Cuccu, Lorenzo. 2001. Il cinema di Paolo e Vittorio Taviani. Natura, cultura, storia nei film dei due registi toscani. Rome: Gremese; Gesù, Sebastiano, ed. 2004 Kaos. Un film di Paolo e Vittorio Taviani Lipari: Edizioni del Centro Studi; Marcus, Millicent. 1993. Filmmaking by the Book. Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation. Baltimore-London: Johns Hopkins University Press; Micheli, Sergio. 1991. Il film: struttura, lingua, stile. Analisi su alcuni campioni di cinema italiano: Antonioni, Scola, Visconti, Taviani. Rome: Bulzoni; Orto, Nuccio. 1997. La notte dei desideri. Il cinema dei fratelli Taviani. Palermo: Sellerio. 3 Here I use the term “theatrality” as defined by Jean Alter in his article (1981) where he makes the distinction between ‘theatrality’, a term adapted from the French ‘théatralité’, and ‘theatricality’, opting for the former as this neologism can be used to cover that ‘total theatre’ which he identifies as a system built of two categories of signs corresponding to the two practical means of theatrical expression, the written text and the mise en scène. Now, I believe that Pirandello

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Pirandello thus came to investigate the specific issues which at that time were also at the centre of the debate on a new art form, cinema, and its relationship with established forms of artistic expression, i.e. theatre and the novel. One of the key issues in his speculation on different forms of dramatic and narrative expression, and one which Pirandello placed at the core of his best known essay, Illustratori, attori e traduttori [Illustrators, actors and translators] (1908), was translation. In his essay4, following a first section dedicated to the illustration of written texts, and while discussing at first the translation of poetry from one language into another, Pirandello quotes Dante Alighieri’s Convivio: “E però sappia ciascuno, che nulla cosa per legame musaico armonizzata si può dalla sua loquela in altra trasmutare, senza rompere tutta sua dolcezza e armonia” [Therefore everyone should know that nothing harmonized according to the rules of poetry can be translated from its native tongue into another without destroying all its sweetness and harmony] (Conv. I, VI). Staying with the art of translation of the classical authors and its methods, Pirandello quotes Giovanni Pascoli’s Pensieri e discorsi [Thoughts and Remarks]: Che è tradurre? così domandava poco fa il più geniale dei filologi tedeschi; e rispondeva: “Il di fuori deve divenir nuovo; il di dentro restar com’è. A dir più preciso, resta l’anima muta il corpo; la vera traduzione è metempsicosi.” Non si poteva dir meglio […]. Dunque intendiamoci: dobbiamo dare allo scrittore antico una veste nuova, non dobbiamo travestirlo. […] E poi, quanto a metempsicosi è giusta (almeno per questo proposito del tradurre) la distinzione di corpo e d’anima? Non è giusta. Mutando corpo si muta anche anima. […] Dobbiamo, insomma, osservare, traducendo, la stessa proporzione che è nel testo, del pensiero con la forma, dell’anima col corpo, del di dentro col di fuori (Pirandello 2006b, 648— 649).

formulated a conception of theatre as a total experience that is very close to that expressed by Alter, and virtuously reformulated the role of both the text and the performance. In his Dal letterario al filmico. Sistema del racconto [From literary to filmic. System of story-telling] originally published in 1983, André Gaudreault takes up the concept of theatrality and places it in a very productive dialogue with the concepts of narrativity and literality, with particular attention paid to early cinema. It seems opportune to note that Gaudreault gives us a new perspective to use in analysing Pirandello’s attitudes with regard to cinema, but also, and above all, in the study of that incessant course of ‘trans/lation’ from one text to another, from one processuality to another, from one code to another, which seems to inform all the work of the artist from Agrigento.

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What is translation? The most brilliant of German philologists asked this question recently, and his answer was: “The outer aspect must become new; the inner aspect must stay as it is. To put it more precisely, the soul remains whilst the body changes; true translation is metempsychosis.” He could not have expressed it in a better way ... Thus we reach an understanding: we must give the classical writer a new guise, but we must not disguise him ... And, as for metempsychosis, is it right (at least as far as translation is concerned) to distinguish between body and soul? It is not right. In changing the body one also changes the soul ... In conclusion, we must, when translating, observe the same proportions of thought and form, of soul and body and of the inner and outer aspects of the text.

However, Pirandello goes on to observe that Pascoli, in making this distinction between body and soul, falls back into the old mistake of romantic and classical criticism—“come se De Sanctis e, dopo, tanti altri valentuomini che han disputato di critica estetica avessero predicato al vento” [as if De Sanctis, and the many other worthy men who debated aesthetic criticism after him, had been preaching to the winds] (Pirandello 2006b, 649)—since the poet, in saying this, tends to identify the body as form and the soul as thought, and thus consider form as an outer aspect. “Ma se potessero veramente separarsi il contenuto artistico dalla sua forma, corpo sarebbe il pensiero, anima la forma,” [But if one really could separate artistic content from its form, the body would be thought, and the soul, form] (Pirandello 2006b, 649) the writer states, since, in his view, one can always translate, that is to say ‘make people understand’, that which a writer thinks or has thought in another language, but the soul, that is to say the form, which in art is everything, cannot be “rendered”: Mutando il corpo, cioè il pensiero, si muta anche l’anima, cioè la forma: questo è ovvio. Ma serbando il corpo, il pensiero, gli si può dare un’anima, un’espressione diversa? Questo tenta la traduzione. E tenta l’impossibile: come far rivivere un cadavere inalandogli un’altra anima. Quel che il Pascoli chiama il di fuori è proprio l’espressione: ma l’espressione appunto è l’anima (Pirandello 2006b, 650). In changing the body, that is to say the thought, one also changes the soul, the form: this much is obvious. But in maintaining the body, the thought, can one give it a different soul, a different expression? This is what translation attempts to do. And it attempts the impossible: bringing a corpse back to life by breathing into it a new soul. What Pascoli calls the outer aspect is really expression: but expression is simply the soul.

In the same essay, reflecting on the case of the mise en scène of an author’s work, Pirandello considers such a staging not as “la rappresentazione vera e propria dell’espressione genuina, originale, ma

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una traduzione, cioè un’espressione somigliante, più o meno prossima all’originale; non mai la stessa” [the true and proper representation of the genuine, original expression, but a translation, i.e. a similar expression, more or less following the original, though never the same] (649) and adds that this is ultimately “un’espressione più o meno guasta e diminuita” [a more or less broken and diminished expression] (653). Moreover, Pirandello states that the same occurs when reading a work, since in the act of reading, or rather, of rethinking the work when one moves “da uno spirito all’altro, le modificazioni sono inevitabili” [from one spirit to the other, changes are inevitable] (653). Here lies, in his opinion, “la somma difficoltà della critica” [the greatest difficulty of criticism] (654). Pirandello then examines the question of the excellent translation of mediocre works, in which case, if the translation is better than the original, then the translation becomes the original. Moreover, he discusses the case of a praiseworthy mise en scène of an otherwise mediocre drama, stating that the merit rests with the actor, as could also be the case with the illustration of works by minor writers, whether descriptive or decorative (654—55). He goes on to discuss the fact that, for the writer, reflection is a form assumed by sentiment. While writing, the writer also proceeds to criticize his or her work in the creative process, but does not accomplish this through a cold analytical process, but rather by following the impression he or she gradually receives from the work itself. For both writer and spectator, the work is therefore felt and not simply judged (655—56). Pirandello maintains that the same thing happens to the actor, who does not examine the work coldly, but feels it, perceiving at a stroke, whether through a sudden sentiment or sympathy, that part which best suits him, thus finding within himself the character he must bring onto the stage (656). However, the actor living in and of the artificial, conventional world of the stage, Pirandello continues, “è spesso indotto a vedere nell’opera d’arte principalmente quanto vi è di teatrale” [is often induced to see the theatrical aspect of the work to the detriment of everything else] (656), just as the illustrator sees only what can be illustrated in a book. Therefore the actor, in the fruition of the work, is driven more by the material reasons of the theatre than by the ideal reasons of the art form, more by the fictitious reality of his stage action than by the higher truth of artistic expression (656). Therefore, as a direct consequence of his reasoning, Pirandello condemns those who take on writing for the theatre, while at the same time, recognizing “la triste necessità dell’arte loro” [the sad necessity of their art] (656—57).

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Towards his conclusion, Pirandello does, however, trace a clear path for playwrights, identifying the priority of having ‘free people’ in the birth of drama. To this effect, he states, Ogni idea, ogni azione, perché appariscano in atto, vive innanzi agli occhi nostri, han bisogno della libera individualità umana, in cui si mostrino come movente affettivo: bisogno, insomma, di caratteri. Ora il carattere sarà tanto più determinato e superiore, quanto meno sarà o si mostrerà soggetto alla intenzione o ai modi dell’autore, alle necessità dello sviluppo del fatto immaginato; quanto meno si mostrerà strumento passivo d’una data azione, e quanto più invece farà vedere in ogni suo atto quasi tutto un proprio essere e, insieme, una concreta specialità. (657) Every idea and every action, in order to appear in the acting, must first exist in our eyes, they need free human individuality, in which to show their emotional motives: in short, they need character. The more determined and superior the character, the less it will be, or appear to be, subject to the intentions and methods of the author, or to the necessity of developing the imagined fact; the less it will be the passive instrument of a given action, and the more it will show, in almost all its actions, its own being and, with this, the concrete aspects that make it special.

In my opinion, in these words we can appreciate the ideal foundation of Pirandello’s great theatre, and thus the deeper justification—theoretical as well as ideal—of all his characters in search of an author, and even his many translations, rather trans-codifications if not true and proper ‘adaptations’ of short stories into plays, as well as plays into short stories, short stories into novels and even scripts, and so on. This is perhaps the most appropriate perspective from which to thoroughly understand the passage of short stories into theatre. We can then move on to discuss the further transfer to a possible filmic text, and thus to yet another and even more different language. Before starting the main body of my analysis, which is the translation of one of Luigi Pirandello’s short stories by the Taviani brothers, it is only right to remind ourselves that the essay IAT does not end this way. In fact Pirandello gives a different conclusion to his aesthetic investigation, as he defines it. In his conclusion, Pirandello makes a distinction between drama (written text) and theatrical representation. In doing so, he identifies the former as the work of art, and the latter as nothing more than the “traduzione o interpretazione di essa, copia più o meno somigliante che vive in una realtà materiale e pur fittizia e illusoria” [translation or interpretation of it, a more or less faithful copy that exists in a material and even fictitious and illusory reality] (658). He then concludes by stating that if one wanted to find the original work at the theatre, then one would have

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to resort to the commedia dell’arte, and yet it would be nothing but a vulgar work of improvisation, devoid of the ideal simplification and concentration that typify every work of true art (658). Therefore, in order to tackle the question of the passage of a short story into a theatrical text, and subsequently into a filmic text, it is useful to recall the observations made in the conclusion of IAT. Pirandello supports, once again, the centrality of the character’s freedom, even in the case of the translation, or rather, of the transition from one code to another, and therefore of the transposition of a narrative text, for example, into a theatrical text, or even of the mise en scène of a written text. The characters must show their independence from the author’s intentions as well as the urgency of their actions, thus confirming the originality of their own being. A representative case is the short story L’altro figlio [The Other Son], published in La lettura in February 1905. It was later transformed in a oneact play and brought to the stage by Ferdinando Paolieri on 23rd November 1923 at the National Theatre of Rome, in a mise en scène in Tuscan vernacular. This is the text taken by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani and adapted for the big screen as one of the four episodes of Kaos. It is important to note that Pirandello had attempted a previous transcodification of the short story by drafting the passage of the narrative text into the theatrical one, the timing of which is most relevant to our discussion. In fact, the short story L’altro figlio became a play only after the writing and staging of Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore [Six Characters in Search of an Author], the first and greatest masterpiece of Pirandello’s “theatre within the theatre,” brought to the stage for the first time by Dario Niccodemi’s company at Rome’s Teatro Valle on 9th May 1921, when it ‘flopped’ in a sensational failure, to later be triumphantly resurrected on 27th September of the same year at the Teatro Manzoni in Milan. The question of timing is not at all a minor issue, since in both texts, i.e. Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore and the one-act play L’altro figlio, notwithstanding the enormous differences between the two, we find a subject matter which runs subtly through many of Pirandello’s works. It is “motherhood.” In many works the motherhood theme becomes a strong and important metaphor for artistic creation and a means by which Pirandello investigates the creative process. Such is the case in Sei personaggi, as well as in L’altro figlio, both in the short story and the oneact play, where it subtly encourages the acceleration of both narrative and dramatic action at the moment when the mother, almost demanding her freedom, relives in her memory the anomalous “creation” of the son she

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had never accepted or recognized. A violated, violently imposed and ever unrecognized motherhood which stands in stark opposition to the motherhood of raising two sons, who later abandon her, a motherhood which is not only openly admitted but constantly, obsessively reasserted to the point of derision, abandonment and scorn. The response to an imposed motherhood is, therefore, the demand for the recognized legitimacy of true motherhood, which was free and desired by the “mother character” who fully recognizes herself only in that motherhood, even when faced with abandonment and neglect. This is the grand theme of both the short story and the one-act play, and it is also the theme that runs through and motivates the filmic version of the story created by the Taviani brothers. Not only does the theme permeate the first episode of the film, i.e. the episode following the prologue of the crow, but permeates the entire film, and finds its true and most profound justification in the extraordinary conclusion of the filmic tale. The Taviani brothers end their film with an imaginary conversation between Luigi Pirandello and his mother, in which the son “dis/covers” his mother’s truth, perhaps for the first time. The theme of motherhood, so obsessively re/presented by Pirandello in both narrative and dramatic texts as the most relevant and powerful leitmotif of a life but also as the most relevant and powerful metaphor for artistic creation, is cleverly combined with another Pirandellian obsession: translation as the creation of an original, much sought after but very rarely achieved. It may be useful here to reconnect to our opening analysis of Pirandello’s statements in IAT, when the author writes that “mutando il corpo, cioè il pensiero, si muta anche l’anima, cioè la forma. […] Ma serbando il corpo, il pensiero, gli si può dare un’anima, un’espressione diversa? Questo tenta la traduzione. E tenta l’impossibile: come far rivivere un cadavere inalandogli un’altra anima” [In changing the body, that is to say the thought, one also changes the soul, the form. (…) But in maintaining the body, the thought, can one give them a different soul, a different expression? This is what translation attempts to do. And it attempts the impossible: how to bring a corpse back to live by breathing into it a new soul] (650). Is this not the great dilemma Maragrazia faces in relation to that son whose body/thought is always the same, a never changing and constant trace of a tempus horribilis, that absolutely cannot find for her “a different soul or expression?” Translation is impossible, and Maragrazia reaffirms this by reclaiming her own autonomy and freedom, even though this could be a painful and ambiguous act, as it is, for example, in the Taviani’s interpretation when, at the end of a long flashback, she initially looks at that son/body/thought of the past (649— 650), with softened and docile eyes, but then the sight of some pumpkins

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abandoned on a wall brings back the past with an urgency that undermines her maternal instinct, and hinders a reunion that could reassemble not only one but two lives. Motherhood, therefore, is conceived and portrayed as a process of translation, here intended in the oldest meaning of the word, from the Latin traducere, to transport. The mother is the one who transports the child from un-being into being, in other words, into existing here and now, in a process of recognition that begins and ends with her, the Mother. This is why Maragrazia’s son does not exist for her, since she has never recognized the process of his translation, which is not only the passage from nothingness to the hic et nunc of birth, and not even that of the here and now of conception.5 Furthermore, the theme of the journey, another important leitmotif of the Pirandellian macro-text and the Tavianis’ cinema, is also connected to and strengthens this idea of traducere and therefore of ‘trans/lation’ into another place and time, and, strangely enough, runs through the narrative of L’altro figlio as well as the staging of its theatrical version and the narration of its filmic rendering. In fact, with the exception of minor changes, what remains of the original narrative text in both the play and film is connected to the themes of motherhood and the journey, as well as to the complex relationship between mother and son. Following a brief introduction, loosely based on the short story Il corvo di Mizzaro [The Crow of Mizzaro] (1902), almost a prologue to the filmic rendering of four short stories by Luigi Pirandello, the Taviani brothers choose, in fact, to begin their filmic récit with a panoramic overview of Sicily’s Valle dei Templi [Valley of the Temples] upon which they write the words, used by the Sicilian author, to describe his arrival on the Earth, …Io dunque son figlio del Caos; e non allegoricamente, ma in giusta realtà, perché son nato in una nostra campagna, che trovasi presso ad un intricato bosco, denominato, in forma dialettale, Càvusu dagli abitanti di 6 Girgenti. Colà la mia famiglia si era rifugiata dal terribile colera del 1867, che infierì fortemente nella Sicilia. Quella campagna, però, porta scritto l'appellativo di Lina, messo da mio padre in ricordo della prima figlia appena nata e che è maggiore di me di un anno; ma nessuno si è adattato al nuovo nome, e quella campagna continua, per i più, a chiamarsi Càvusu, corruzione dialettale del genuino e antico vocabolo greco Xàos (Pirandello 2006a, 55).

5 6

On the role of women in Pirandello’s work see also Alonge, Bini, and Gunsberg. The former name for Agrigento.

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… I am therefore a son of Caos; and not in an allegorical sense, but in true reality, because I was born in a country town, near a tangled wood which the inhabitants of Girgenti call, in their dialect, Càvusu. There my family sought refuge from the terrible cholera epidemic, rampant in Sicily in 1867. That town, however, has the official name of Lina, given by my father in honor of his first new born daughter, who was a year older than me; but no-one got used to the new name and in the town most people continue to call it Càvusu, a dialectal corruption of the genuine ancient Greek word Xàos.

These words can be read in Frammento d’autobiografia [Autobiographical Fragment], a piece dictated by Pirandello to his friend Pio Spezi in Monte Cavo, on 15th August 1893. As it has been observed by Baldi, this opening characterized by a quotation marked by three dots, indicating a kind of suspense, is indeed a reference to a beginning which is, in turn, characterized by void, indistinctness and the non-expression of the coming into the light, in life as well as on the page (172—195). A “coming into the light” which, through a journey, i.e. the movement that marks the crossing of a threshold, carries the subject from there and then to here and now, finds in the time and space of Xàos its most fertile soil. Significantly, the Taviani brothers have captured the substance of this journey of selfcreation, and, to the erratic, almost magical gaze of the crow, accompanied by the shamanistic sound of the bell tied around its neck by shepherds, they almost entrust the evocation of the stories unfolding in the four episodes of the film and concluding with the extraordinary epilogue in which, perhaps for the first time, one finds the true justification of that void, that indistinctness which always marked the life and work of Luigi Pirandello. The changes made by the author in the process of translation of the 1905 short story into the 1922-23 theatrical text are few but relevant. In the short story the action unfolds in several places in the town of Farnia, moving from Ninfarosa’s house to the residence of the doctor, who then carries the action to Rocco Trupia’s house, and then brings us back to his home for a final and dramatic exchange with Maragrazia, the Mother, who is the central character of the whole tale as well as of the tragic story of the fable. In the theatrical one-act version, the action unfolds almost entirely in front of Ninfarosa’s house, facing onto a small square where the winding streets of the town converge. In the 1905 narrative the action is spread over a period of two days, while in the play everything happens on the same day, in the early evening, that time which, in the words of Dante, “che volge al disio e ai naviganti ‘ntenerisce il core” [melts with homesick yearning the hearts of seafarers] (Purg. VIII, 1—2), but, above all, at twilight when objects fade and we are transported from day into night,

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from light into darkness. The choice of this specific hour for the action to unfold is obviously important for this mise en scène of painful revelations or ‘translations’ of a past never concluded into a present still racked with torment, pain and the eternal impossibility of going back in time. It is indeed impossible to return to the light in a dramatic action marked by a tragedy experienced in a past which is eternally present. It is impossible to regain access to both reason and an entirely understandable meaning in the story of a humanity humiliated and offended, whose redemption is equally impossible. This is the true meaning of Pirandello’s text, a meaning greatly sought after by the Taviani brothers who give it an admirable filmic rendering in the first episode of Kaos. Their original plan was to turn the 1905 short story into the second episode of the film. However, for the final version the directors decided to move it, skillfully, to immediately after the prologue. This move signals a shift in the initial sense of the project, and perhaps the acceptance and embracing of the ultimate meaning of Pirandello’s story, in its twofold expression, narrative and dramatic. Such intimate meaning truly provides the filmic narration with clear guidelines. I would like to emphasize here the fact that the rendering of this particular story on film finds in both the short story and the play its own literal source, so to speak, and identifies in Pirandello’s complete works its ultimate meaning. In fact, the first episode of Kaos is not the filmic rendering of the action one finds in the short story, since it retains instead the unity of time and space one finds in the theatrical text. Whereas in the 1905 narrative text, as discussed above, the action is spread over two days and takes place in various locations in Farnia, the one-act play stages the action that unfolds in just two hours in front of Ninfarosa’s house, overlooking the town square. In the film, the action unwinds over a period of approximately three hours, starting inside Ninfarosa’s house, where the story’s brief introduction is set, and where Maragrazia dictates a letter to the woman who only writes in scribbles. It then swiftly moves to a road and remains there for the entire duration of the episode. This is the cursed road which carries children, husbands and fathers far away from their families, to that land of gold, as Maragrazia herself defines it, a land of dreams from which no-one ever returns, America. A land so terribly far away from this “land of tears”, again in the words of this mater dolorosa, the land she clings onto in despair. Signaled by the presence of the crow, symbolic of an ill omen, the first episode of the Taviani brothers’ splendid film unfolds on a sun-baked road through a parched landscape. From its incipit the film declares a close association with the personal and biographical dimension, already shown

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in the film’s opening, since this first episode finds a sort of introduction in the passage, quoted above, in which Luigi Pirandello demonstrates and painfully admits his belonging to Caos. These words are evoked on the screen at the end of the prologue, that is the filmic version of Il corvo di Mizzaro. The beginning of Kaos, and, therefore, also of the film version of L’altro figlio, is indeed preceded by a preface in which one can identify the themes running through the whole film: motherhood, the journey, but also the role of fate and the transfiguring power of the gaze. First of all the camera shows a series of close-ups of the shepherds’ faces looking at something not visible to the extradiegetic viewer. Slowly the frame widens to include the object of their gaze, a male crow which is ‘miraculously’ hatching eggs. It is therefore the shepherds’ view that ‘translates’ for us, and carries us into a narrative which establishes an immediately ambiguous and mysterious relationship with reality. The crow is male, but he is nonetheless sitting on eggs. This subtle trick, created thanks to the interaction of two fundamental themes, that of motherhood, and therefore the capacity to “translate,” “transport” and “create,” and the theme of vision which with the Taviani brothers decide to open their narrative, is a direct reference to the Pirandellian macro-text—from the short stories to the novels and the theatrical works, establishing with such a complex text a deep and intimate relationship which goes beyond the ‘literal meaning’ of the chosen stories. Pirandello’s entire production, in fact, includes the theme of the gaze and the metaphor of vision. Moreover, the primacy of the eye, of the gaze and of vision runs through the whole passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, and is often expressed in a manifestation of the sublime. According to the pure-visibilistic theory held by Konrad Fiedler, in fact, vision “è una facoltà conoscitiva e creatrice di forme (visive), operante nell'attività artistica in modo assolutamente indipendente sia dall’intelletto, creatore di forme concettuali, sia dal sentimento e dalla sensazione; indipendente quindi anche dalle concezioni filosofiche, scientifiche, religiose” [is a cognitive faculty creating (visual) forms, and one which, within an artistic work operates in an entirely independent way from both the intellect, the creator of conceptual forms, and emotions and feelings; it is therefore also independent from philosophical, scientific and religious ideas] (Nigro Covre 1975, xiv).7 According to Wilhelm Worringer’s extraordinary 1908 essay, Abstraktion und Einfühlung,8 in the twentieth 7

On Fiedler see also Podro, Michael. 1961. The parallel of linguistic and visual formulation in the writing of Konrad Fiedler. Turin: Edizioni di Filosofia. 8 It seems significant to me that Worringer’s essay was written at the same time as Pirandello’s essay on humour and his essay IAT.

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century, abstraction, a mental process which is a direct consequence of the primacy of vision running throughout the twentieth century, embodies the possibility of taking reality back to a synthetic and global vision, and represents the search for the absolute in an era of relativity. Pirandello, like so many other authors who were interpreters and witnesses of this passage to a new era, was not indifferent to the power of the gaze; the metaphor of vision runs throughout his work, as already witnessed by his revolutionary 1904 novel, Il fu Mattia Pascal [The Late Mattia Pascal]. It is also found in L’altro figlio, the short story and the one-act play. Such a metaphor can be seen at work at various moments when Maragrazia refers to the eyes and the gaze, as possible ways to access the truth, or as places and / or a means whereby betrayal is impossible. There are numerous examples in the narrative and dramatic texts, for example in the short story with this description of Maragrazia, “tra quelle rughe e quel sangue e quelle lagrime, gli occhi chiari apparivano come lontani, quelli d’un’infanzia senza memorie. Ora, spesso, qualche mosca le si attaccava, vorace, a quegli occhi” [through those wrinkles and that blood and those tears, her bright eyes appeared far away, like eyes of a childhood without memories. Now, often, a fly would attack them greedily, those eyes] (Pirandello 2006c, 31), and in the descriptive insert which tells us about her condition, Ogni qual volta una nuova comitiva d’emigranti partiva da Farnia […] seguiva per un lungo tratto dello stardone polveroso la comitiva […] e, camminando, guardava affitto affitto gli occhi di questo o di quel giovane emigrante […]—Vecchia matta,—qualcuno le gridava.—O perché mi guardate così? Vorreste cavarmi gli occhi?—No, bello, te li invidio!—gli rispondeva la vecchia.—Perché tu li vedrai i miei figliuoli. Dì loro come m’hai lasciata; che non mi ritriveranno più, se tardano ancora (Pirandello 2006c, 33). Every so often a new group of emigrants left Farnia […] for a long stretch of the dusty road she followed the group […] and, whilst walking, she looked fixedly into the eyes of one or the other of the young emigrants […]—Crazy old woman,—someone shouted at her—Why are you looking at me like that? Do you want to pull out my eyes?—No, handsome, I’m jealous of them!—replied the old woman.—Because you will see my children again. Tell them how they’ve left me; that they’ll never see me again, if they take much longer.

A further example is when Rocco Trupia is first introduced, and Pirandello describes him as having “gli occhi verdastri, affossati, gli guizzavano a tratti di torvi sguardi figgenti” [greenish, sunken eyes,

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sudden surly glances flashed from them] (Pirandello 2006c, 46); “gli occhi gli s’erano iniettati di sangue” [his eyes had been injected with blood] (48). In the short story, Ninfarosa introduces the story of Rocco Trupia and Maragrazia. The story is then told, by Rocco, to the doctor when he goes to the Casa della Colonna, and only later is it narrated by Maragrazia. However, the doctor is still the one who “collects” the mother’s story. … e n’ho viste! n’ho viste! Ho visto cose, signorino mio, che vossignoria non si può nemmeno immaginare.—Che avete visto, insomma? Parlate!— la incitò il dottore.—Cose nere! cose nere!—sospirò la vecchi scotendo il capo.—Vossignoria non era allora neanche nella mente di Dio, e io le ho viste con questi occhi che hanno pianto da allora lagrime di sangue. Ha sentito parlare vossignoria d’un certo Canebardo? (50) … and I’ve seen ‘em! I’ve seen ‘em! I’ve seen things, my master, that you my lord could not even imagine.—What have you seen, then? Speak!— the doctor urged her.—Dark things! Dark things!—the old woman murmurs, shaking her head.—You my lord were not even in the mind of God, and I saw them with these eyes that have cried tears of blood since then. Have you heard my lord of a certain Canebardo?

In this way Maragrazia’s story begins, and it starts with Garibaldi’s arrival in Sicily. She narrates a past, now eternally present, from which she cannot free herself and which prevents her from recognizing her son. The theme of the gaze is also featured in the description of the husband after Cola Camizzi had taken him away with him, and he returned with “gli occhi da insensato” [the eyes of a fool] (51), and when the memory brings her back to that day when she went frantically searching for her husband and remained “stravolta dall’orrore, con gli occhi sanguigni sbarrati” [greatly disturbed by the horror of it, her bleeding eyes wide open] (52). Once the narration of that forced, and therefore hated, motherhood is completed, the short story ends with Maragrazia continuing her dictation, “Cari figli” [Dear children] (54). These are the words that begin the film version of Maragrazia’s story, which at first concentrates on the descriptive insert appearing in the short story immediately after the presentation of the female character, and thus justifies the fact that the action takes place on that sun-baked road in a little over three hours. Following this, the Taviani brothers portray before our astonished eyes the story that Maragrazia tells the doctor of the traumatic event that changed her life. In the film, the tragedy is rendered as a long and “frantic” flashback in which the camera either stays frozen to attentively record what happens, or tries to spy on events whilst incapable of overcoming them, due to their extreme violence. At the end of the story,

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in the first episode of the film, the mother’s instinct almost gets the upper hand over past horror when Maragrazia turns a sweet and maternal glance to Rocco Trupia, a glance he had longed for so much and had never before experienced. However, that glance is suddenly captured by the sight of some pumpkins on the wall the woman had been leaning against. The process of transfiguration is immediate and violent, and, in a gesture that suddenly reveals the dread she feels, she grabs one of the pumpkins and throws it, before turning away and refusing her glance to the man who wants so much to recognize himself in her eyes. The mother, therefore, refuses the son the necessary process of recognition, i.e. the process of self-determination and self-definition of subjectivity that every son can achieve, for the first time, through the eyes of his mother, in the ultimate process of ‘translation’ from ‘not being’ into being. It is significantly therefore, that the Taviani brothers give filmic expression, in Kaos, to a fundamental and salient feature of Pirandello’s work, and specifically to the obsession of vision that runs throughout his opus. They make it almost a conducting wire through their narrative, not only in this but in every episode of the film; a leitmotif certainly, but also a strategy of the récit with which they seek to give a meaning, truly their own sense, to the ‘recovery’ of Luigi Pirandello’s work in its entirety. This is the true meaning behind the words with which the writer’s mother concludes the conversation with her son in the epilogue to the film, and gives an intense and revealing conclusion to the whole narrative, with a clear reference to vision that links it closely to the theme of motherhood as a broad metaphor for creative tension.9 In conclusion, this is after all an intense metaphorical intertwining, but also the true cognitive paradigm and the heuristic means which guided the work of “translation” carried out by the Taviani brothers, and which more significantly so, ran through the life and work of Luigi Pirandello. Translated by Sarah Gray

Works Cited Alighieri, Dante. Convivio. 1998. Trans. Richard Lansing. New York: Columbia University Press. http://dante.ilt.columbia.edu/books/convivi/convivio.html#07 —. 1955. Divine Comedy. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. London: Penguin.

9

See Caputo 1996, 37—56.

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Alonge, Roberto. 1997. Madri, baldracche, amanti: la figura femminile nel teatro di Pirandello. Milan: Costa & Nolan. Alter, Jean. 1981. From Text to Performance: Semiotics of Theatrality. Poetics Today 2, 3: 113—139. Baldi, Andrea. 1999. Letteratura e mito in “Kaos.” MLN 114, 1: 172— 195. Bini, Daniela. 1998. Pirandello and His Muse: The Plays for Marta Abba. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Caputo, Rino. 1996. Il piccolo padreterno. Saggi di lettura dell’opera di Pirandello. Rome: eUroma. Cuccu, Lorenzo. 2001. Il cinema di Paolo e Vittorio Taviani. Natura, cultura, storia nei film dei due registi toscani. Rome: Gremese. Gieri, Manuela. 2007. Del corpo e dell’anima: da Pirandello ai Taviani. Letteratura, teatro, cinema. In La novella di Pirandello. Dramma film musica fumetto, ed. Enzo Lauretta, 107—120. Pesaro: Metauro. Gaudreault, André. 2000. Dal letterario al filmico. Sistema del racconto. Turin: Lindau. Gesù, Sebastiano, ed. 2004. Kaos. Un film di Paolo e Vittorio Taviani. Lipari: Edizioni del Centro Studi. Gunsberg, Mary. 1994. Patriarchal Representations: Gender and Discourse in Pirandello’s Theatre. Oxford-Providence: Berg. Marcus, Millicent. 1993. Filmmaking by the Book. Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation. Baltimore-London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Micheli, Sergio. 1991. Il film: struttura, lingua, stile. Analisi su alcuni campioni di cinema italiano: Antonioni, Scola, Visconti, Taviani. Rome: Bulzoni. Nigro Covre, Jolanda. 1975. Introduction to Astrazione e empatia by Wilhelm Worringer. Turin: Einaudi. Orto, Nuccio. 1997. La notte dei desideri. Il cinema dei fratelli Taviani. Palermo: Sellerio. Pirandello, Luigi. 2006a. Frammento d’autobiografia. In Saggi e interventi by Luigi Pirandello, ed. Ferdinando Taviani. Milan: Mondadori. 55— 57. —. 2006b. Illustratori, attori e traduttori. In Saggi e interventi by Luigi Pirandello, ed. Ferdinando Taviani. Milan: Mondadori. 635—658. —. L’altro figlio. 2006c. In Novelle per un anno by Luigi Pirandello, Vol. II.1, ed. Mario Costanzo. Milan: Mondadori. 31—54. —. 2004. L’altro figlio. In Maschere nude, Vol. 3, by Luigi Pirandello. Ed. Masolino D’Amico. Milan: Mondatori. 449—478.

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Michael Podro, Michael. 1961. The parallel of linguistic and visual formulation in the writing of Konrad Fiedler. Turin: Edizioni di Filosofia. Vinci, Leonardo da. 1949. Paragone, A Comparison of the Arts. Trans. Irma A. Richter. London: Oxford University Press. Worringer, Wilhelm. 1975. Astrazione e empatia. Turin: Einaudi.

FRANCESCO ROSI’S LA TREGUA: A TIME ODYSSEY GAETANA MARRONE, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

On many occasions, we, the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, have come to understand that words are incapable of describing our experiences. Their poor reception is due to the fact that we now live in a culture of images, recorded, multiplied, televised, and that the public, particularly the young, is less likely to benefit from the printed word. —Primo Levi 1985.

1. Probing the Limits of Representation In the epilogue of La tregua [The Truce] (1997), Francesco Rosi’s last feature film, at the end of his long journey, Primo Levi begins to write while sitting at his desk in Turin. With his eyes fixed on the camera, and marked for life by his prison tattoo, the Auschwitz survivor repeats the words of Se questo è un uomo: Voi che vivete sicuri Nelle vostre tiepide case, Voi che trovate tornando a sera Il cibo caldo e visi amici: Considerate se questo è un uomo (Levi 1963, 7). You, who live safe In your warm homes, You, who on returning home at night Find hot food and friendly faces: Ask yourself if this is a man.1

1

Unless otherwise stated, all translations are mine.

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Rosi handles the theme of Levi’s return home with a dire warning to the viewer. He breaks his audience’s hypnotic attention by eliciting their active participation. The film’s final scene activates the mechanisms of identification with an ontological space: the last shots of Primo, in the house where he was born and where he dies by his own choice, on 11th April 1987, challenge our responsibility to open our eyes and see, to open our hearts and recapture our ancient humanity. Primo Levi’s La tregua [The Reawakening] (1963) is one of the most outstandingly moving novels of post-war Italy. Its cultural and political relevance inspired Rosi to work on an original treatment of the large-scale project since the early 1960s, along with Tonino Guerra. This project was somewhat delayed by the expenses of production and was not brought to the screen until 1997, with John Turturro in the leading role, (screenplay by Rosi, Stefano Rulli, and Sandro Petraglia). Rosi’s film champions Levi as the progressive counterpart to the “static” view of the Holocaust found in the established historical responses to the Nazi atrocity. The critical debates over La tregua attest to the director’s commitment of fashioning a cinematic equivalent of Levi’s novel:2 the true cost of a man’s soul becomes the most shattering measurement of surviving in a world where the ideology of evil is the ultimate historical drama. In his decision to film Levi’s text, Rosi faced a formidable challenge. If cinema is “un occhio sulla realtà,” [an eye on reality] as he believed, then the testimonial memoir of one of the most renown survivors of the Holocaust becomes a locus for documentation and denunciation, as well as for storytelling (Mancino and Zambetti, 6). For Rosi, cinema is a medium through which to tell stories, where we can learn how to judge events in the context of history;3 and, more significantly, we are endowed with the moral responsibility that the Holocaust representation demands. As Millicent Marcus has perceptively remarked, because the novel is a text of witness it exhibits an “almost biblical referentiality,” and any adaptation seen to deviate from the latter could elicit “charges of heresy” (2002, 253). On this

2

See, for example, Cesare Segre, who claims that Rosi’s adaptation does not translate the austere style of the Turinese antifascist Jews of the 1940s (1997, 31). 3 “Ho sempre creduto nella funzione del cinema come denuncia e come testimonianza della realtà, e come racconto di storie attraverso le quali i figli possano conoscere meglio i padri e trarne insegnamento per un giudizio di cui la Storia costituisce il riferimento” [I have always believed that the main function of cinema is to report and to witness reality and as a medium to tell stories through which sons can better understand their fathers and learn how to judge these stories in the context of History] (Mancino and Zambetti, 5). See also 103.

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point, Levi himself is revelatory when he ascribes his autobiographical writing to Hebrew scripture (Deuteronomy): Meditate che questo è stato: Vi comando queste parole. Scolpitele nel vostro cuore Stando in casa andando per via, Coricandovi alzandovi; Ripetetele ai vostri figli (Levi 1958, 7). Meditate that this has been: I command these words. Carve them in your hearts Staying at home, going on the way, Upon going to bed, when rising up; Repeat them to your children.

Rosi’s La tregua meditates on the challenges posed by the dynamics between the pessimism of reason and the optimism of the will; it also meditates on how the language of film works. Levi’s scientific logic is often cast in the shadow of pessimism, yet the director strives for a political allegory for the future. He evokes the nameless suffering and hope for a generation for whom the truths of the Holocaust are, to a certain extent, remote.

2. Realms of Memory: La tregua as self-conscious narrative La tregua is Primo Levi’s sequel to his classic memoir of his year of camp labour at the Buna-Monowitz chemical plant, Se questo è un uomo [Survival at Auschwitz, 1947; enlarged ed. 1958]. Written between December 1961 and November 1962, it recounts his picturesque, ninemonth-long journey back to Italy after the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army on the 27th of January 1945. More explicitly, the novel describes the daily life of a heterogeneous group of human beings (Jews and non-Jews alike) gathered at the Katowice resettlement camp in June 1945. They are petty thieves, farmers, gypsies, as well as intellectuals, coming from diverse ethnic backgrounds, speaking Italian, Polish, Czech, French, Greek and German, and obeying different social and moral codes. While the multiplicity of languages at the prison camp seems to be the realization of a biblical curse (the myth of Babel), as Cesare Segre has suggested (1990, 93—94), it becomes the starting-point, with the newfound freedom, for recapturing a common bond that supersedes the

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geographical boundaries: Levi and his companions see their linguistic knowledge expand into a promising gamut of possibilities. In the opening chapters of the novel, entitled “Il disgelo” [The Thaw] and “Il Campo Grande” [The Main Camp], Levi attempts to confront the Holocaust “in its very ‘matter’,” i.e. “from the viewpoint of a chemist of history” (33), as Berel Lang has pointed out.4 He questions the memorable christening of a series of rough baths, “alla maniera russa,” [in the Russian manner] and underscores the liberators’ unconscious desire “di spogliarci delle vestigia della nostra vita di prima, di fare di noi degli uomini nuovi, conformi ai loro modelli, di imporci il loro marchio” [to strip us of the vestiges of our former life, to make of us new men consistent with their own models, to impose their model on us] (Levi 1963, 18—19). Notwithstanding the spectrum of this “grande ombra simbolica,” [great symbolic shadow] a change in tone has now taken place. Within this realm of oppressive experience, there is the narrator’s desire to understand: after the escape from hell, there follows the euphoric stage of a difficult, yet rejuvenating journey back to life. The ultimate dilemma confronting anyone who is rescued from a concentration camp is how to communicate a past that remains essentially memorial and real. How can one recount, argues Elie Wiesel, “when—by the scale and weight of its horror—the event defies language?” (xi). For a long time, survivors refused to talk. They were shocked by the fact that after the war, the world continued to function as if nothing had happened, and were hastily inclined to forget the unpleasant. They thought that noone would understand the true price of survival, of being living witnesses to this logic of annihilation. Some endured isolation and self-imposed exclusion. An ontological phenomenon, “The Final Solution,” defies any understanding, hence the drama of the witnesses. The essential could remain unspoken, buried in the ashes that cover the drama of suffering. At the Death Camp, the new “common language” (the language of violence), which allows the victims to communicate with each other, functions as a mechanism for coping with memories of guilt. Earlier on, Levi had the distinct realization that he had hit rock bottom, and he defines this total loss of human dignity as “la demolizione di un uomo” [the destruction of a human being]: Allora per la prima volta ci siamo accorti che la nostra lingua manca di parole per esprimere questa offesa, la demolizione di un uomo. In un 4

Berel Lang characterizes Levi’s writing as chemical: “laboratory-neutral but fiercely bent to his analysis of stuff, with the Holocaust his scientific ‘unknown’ to be broken down into its elements” (33).

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attimo, con intuizione quasi profetica, la realtà ci si è rivelata: siamo arrivati al fondo. Più giù di così non si può andare: condizione umana più misera non c’è, e non è pensabile (Levi 1958, 23). Now, for the first time, we realized that our language lacks the adequate words for expressing this offence, the destruction of a man. In an instant, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality of our state has been revealed to us: we have reached rock bottom. One cannot sink any lower: there exists no lower miserable human condition, and it is unimaginable.5

With the essential strength of those who will not resign themselves to being swallowed up by the void, he feels impelled, by an obscure imperative, to continually metamorphose his experience into storytelling itself. In an interview in 1977, he affirms: “Ormai sono come un magnetofono, basta accendermi ed io ricordo per gli altri. Per quelli che non sono tornati e che facevano di tutto per lasciare un segno. Io sono il testimone di ciò che c’è in fondo al pozzo della notte” [by now I am like a tape recorder; if you turn me on, I begin to remember for the others. For those who did not return but did everything to leave a sign. I am a witness of what exists at the bottom of the well of night] (De Filippo 3). It has been argued that Primo Levi’s writing carries out the mission of testifying to the events he experienced in the past, events that do not persist in the present in which he writes. For this survivor, Auschwitz is an event delimited by history.6 If the Nazi’s monstrous deeds are not of this world but of Auschwitz, would, perhaps, the image (filmic or photographic) be more accessible and expressive than the written word? Levi himself extols the power of photographs to represent past realities for future generations.7 In an interview with Ferdinando Camon, he recalls the circumstances that gave rise to this “hybrid Lager” and that encouraged rational production

5

In his prefatory comments to a photo exhibition, Levi clarifies further: “This was, in fact, our daily thought; language is for the description of our quotidian experience, but here we find ourselves in another world, one that requires a language ‘of this other world,’ a language born here.” (Levi 1985) 6 Thus, as Ezrahi claims, the cause of Levi’s suicide was not Auschwitz, because the camp belonged to the past. Contrary to Borowski and Celan, Levi was not forever trapped “within the electrified barbed wire” (125). For an analysis of Ezrahi’s position, see Alphen 110—11. 7 “More and better than the words,” he writes, photographs “recapture the impressions which the camps, well or badly preserved, more or less transformed into grand sites and sanctuaries, make on visitors” (Levi 1985).

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methods which matched extermination with exploitation, or, better still, extermination through the process of exploitation: Io devo la sopravvivenza a questo: cioè al fatto di essere arrivato, come tutti gli ebrei italiani, abbastanza tardi, e di essere stato infilato in un sistema produttivo [. . .] quello di serbatoio di manodopera a basso prezzo, anzi prezzo nullo. Era stato calcolato in modo molto razionale questo fatto: si prevedeva una sopravvivenza di tre mesi (Camon, 38). I owe my survival to the fact that I arrived rather late at the camp, as did all Italian Jews, and I was inserted in the productive system [. . .] we were reserved for manual labour at a very low cost, in fact free. This plan was conceived in a very rational way: they foresaw a survival period of three months.

The concentration camp empire of Auschwitz, with its sinister strategy to balance the ratio between productive and unproductive prisoners (it had a capacity of approx. 20,000 prisoners), exceeds all the logic of history. Generally, one entered the German camps never to emerge again. Death was a by-product of hard labour, hunger, cold, and illnesses. As Levi describes the Nazi offence against humanity, he makes clear that there is no rational explanation for what happened at the camp. There is simply no warum [why]. In La tregua, the Polish word “Wstawàch” (get up) still haunts the survivor upon reaching home on 19th October, and in spite of his recapturing “il calore della mensa sicura, la concretezza del lavoro quotidiano, la gioia liberatrice del raccontare” [the warmth of secure meals, the solidity of daily work, the liberating joy of recounting [his] story] (Levi 1963, 254). Evoked by a powerful surge of memory, a dream within a dream, the gelid dawn command of Auschwitz seals the concluding lines of “Il risveglio” [The Awakening], the novel’s final chapter. The nightmare that tormented the prisoner in the camp reveals the need to narrate his experience, but no one pays any attention: the anguish of being unable to communicate exceeds that of waking up in the “Lager” (Segre 1990, 95). From such a point-of-view, “Wstawàch” becomes a recurrent act of symbolic communication: “tutto è ora volto in caos: sono solo al centro di un nulla grigio e torbido, ed ecco, io so che cosa questo significa, ed anche so di averlo sempre saputo: sono di nuovo in Lager, e nulla era vero all’infuori del Lager” [now everything has become chaos. I am alone at the centre of a grey, turbid nothing, and then I know what it means, and I also know what I have always known: I am in the Lager once again, and nothing was real outside the Lager] (Levi 1963, 254).

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Primo’s pounding nightmare signals a revolt against the disintegration of his experience of the camp. In its very title, La tregua anticipates this fateful symmetry; it announces temporary stillness, not a permanent solution. The “truce,” as a state of suspension between the rationality of normal, everyday life and the aberrant illogicality of existence at the ¨Lager¨, is revealed, in Levi’s own words, as “una parentesi di illimitata disponibilità, un dono provvidenziale ma irripetibile del destino” [a parenthesis of boundless availability, a providential but unrepeatable gift of destiny] (Levi 1963, 253). If Levi’s journey proves to be an exemplary spiritual experience of hope, the silence and the “shadow of doubt” that the infernal machine of Auschwitz cast upon the inmates, however, can only be overcome during the short-lived respites of pain. Ideally, the title can be extended to cover a broad spectrum of the generation marked by the war, perhaps encompassing all survivors entrapped in the dark space between historical tragedy and the burden of its legacy. The “truce” is an effective metaphor that attests to the recurrent nightly awakening of a shattered self, the period combining of a primordial vitality with the poignant tone of reflective recollection.

3. The Odyssey of a Europe between War and Peace La tregua recounts a story of unforeseen hope suspended between the horrific past and the emptiness of the future. According to Rosi, who focuses on the contemporary relevance of his film, Levi’s wanderings at the borders of civilization represent life as “una tregua tra una guerra e un’altra”: Il racconto ha un taglio letterario e il ritmo della memoria. Soffrirebbe di una certa lentezza. Penso invece che l’attualità del tema, la vita come tregua tra una guerra e un’altra, debba trovare riscontro in un ritmo di contemporaneità, che segni una scansione della narrazione, che racchiuda i vari paragrafi della cronaca. 8 The tale [of Levi] has a literary aspect and a rhythm of memory. The film might suffer from a certain slowness. I think, instead, that the contemporary relevance of the theme, life as a truce between one war and another, ought to be reflected in a rhythm of contemporaneity, which embraces the narration as well as the various chapters of the chronicle.

8

“‘La tregua.’ Adattamento originale di Francesco Rosi.” Cited from the director’s private archival collection. See also Rosi 1997, 47.

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Here lies the true meaning of the text: an odyssey of a Europe between war and peace. As is well known, the film would not be made until 1990s.9 The director recounts the long saga of its production in an interview with Lorenzo Codelli for the French journal Positif: “In April 1987, I called Primo Levi, and I asked him for his book to be made into a film. He answered with enthusiasm. He said to me, ‘you bring me a ray of light at a very dark moment of my existence’. A week later he died in the tragic manner that we all know”(Cordelli, 9). Traumatized by this event, Rosi dared not face Levi’s family immediately, although he did do so afterwards, propelled by a kind of silent word exchanged between the two of them. Prior to the film’s release, in February 1997, the director further explained his choice of adapting La tregua to Furio Colombo: 10 Mi ha scosso, come non mi era mai accaduto, quest’uomo fragile di 24 anni scampato per puro caso al meticoloso progetto di sterminio di Auschwitz, che si aggira nel caos di un dopo che avrebbe dovuto apparirgli insensato. Eppure lui guarda interessato e curioso. Capisce lingue che non si capiscono, decifra gesti insensati, accetta un ruolo in una recita misteriosa, in un mondo allo sbando che non sa cosa sta facendo o dove sta andando (Colombo, 39). It disturbed me—something that had never happened to me before—to think that this fragile twenty-four-year-old man who, having escaped by sheer luck from the meticulous project of extermination at Auschwitz, wandered through the chaos of a future that must have appeared senseless to him. And yet he looks on, interested and curious. He understands languages that cannot be understood, deciphers senseless acts, and accepts a role in a mysterious play in a world adrift, a world which has no idea what it is doing or where it is going.

Francesco Rosi’s epical adaptation of the chaotic world of post-war Europe captures the very moment when civilization triumphs through its flickering glimpses of hope and laughter. Because of its extraordinary moral weight, the subject demanded the largest effort of authenticity in any representation or judgment based on it. The film transcends the argument of viewing the Holocaust as a rupture in history, i.e. an event still beyond the reach of language. From Theodor Adorno’s comments 9 In January of 1996, Rosi signed the contract for La Tregua. Principal photography began in Ukraine on 3rd April and ended on 26th July. Produced by Leo Pescarolo and Guido De Laurentiis, the film premiered at Turin’s Teatro Regio on 10th February, 1997. 10 For production details, see also the author’s interview with Jean Gili (7—8).

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about writing poetry after Auschwitz, to Wiesel’s refusal to endorse what might very well be the limits of representation (written or visual) of the Holocaust, we need to shift to Levi’s plea for a language “of this other world.” Rosi ascribes Primo’s odyssey to ordinary experience, as the survivor who now speaks with the authority of Auschwitz. He relies on impressions, details, and silence. Through the recollection of his extraordinary adventures, Levi conveys the process of coming back to life, and of the re-awakening of hope by indulging in the small and big events of everyday life. Above all, the director notes, “ho voluto far diventare un occhio Primo Levi, cioè un osservatore e un narratore” [I wanted to turn Primo Levi into an eye, that is, an observer and a narrator].11 Rosi is in search of essentials, and concentrates upon an introspective and lyrical John Turturro the temporal relationships of history. He achieves effects worthy of an epic painting: complexity and simplicity are the characteristic elements defining his expressive language. The film unfolds in an atmosphere that oscillates between “la fiaba e la crudezza della cronaca” [fable and the rawness of the news headlines].12 This dichotomy between the representation of the historical reality and the point-of-view of the character, distinguishes Rosi’s demanding method from that of traditional cinematic adaptation. It is almost as though the literariness of the novel were an “incidental element” of the composition of the screenplay (Mancino-Zambetti 1998, 148). Indeed, the director does not restrict himself only to Levi´s book, but relies on passages and reflections drawn from other books as well (particularly I sommersi e i salvati). In both the novel and the film, there is a character that says “I,” but the relationship between narrator and character differs between the two works.13 In the novel, a symbiotic and specular relationship is formed between the author and the protagonist, while in the film Levi’s character is presented in accordance to the canons of narrative objectivity—what Tullio Kezich has called “un magico neorealismo della memoria” [a magic neorealism of memory] (35). For example, in the opening of La tregua, the visual scenes of the camp are taken from the point-of-view of the Russian soldiers as they appear on the horizon. A pair of binoculars is the optical device used by one of the soldiers which represents the camera lens as it establishes the characters, which finally rests on a shot of Levi/Turturro. 11

Cited from the director’s handwritten notes (Archival Collection, December 1995). 12 “’La tregua.’ Adattamento originale di Francesco Rosi” (Archival Collection). 13 Some critics were quick to note that the casting of Turturro, an internationally known actor, influenced Rosi’s interpretation of the Primo’s character, now rather a protagonist than a witness. See, for example, Cortellazzo and Tomasi 77.

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Rosi takes on the reality of the Holocaust, which is interpreted through a lens that goes beyond tired stereotypes. While drafting his treatment he writes: Lasciarsi dietro le spalle le immagini tragiche del Lager. Vederle attraverso il velo della neve che cade, come fosse una memoria. E la memoria tornerà infatti, sistematicamente durante la narrazione, come a puntualizzare un dolore sempre in agguato, a contrastare i momenti, anche più dolci, quando meno ce la si aspetta, a ricordarci che la vita è una tregua tra un dolore e l’altro, o meglio, tra una guerra e l’altra. 14 Leaving behind the tragic images of the camps. Seeing them through a veil of falling snow, as if it were a memory. In fact, memory systematically returns, during the narration of the film, as if to punctuate a sorrow waiting in ambush, contrasting even the sweetest moments, when you least expect it, reminding us that life is a truce between one sorrow and the next, or even better, between one war and another.

Working under tremendous pressure, on location in Eastern Europe, Rosi was able to create a moving story of survival, both physical and interior, measured out to the last detail, at times irreducibly real and familiar, at others, undeniably threatening and alien. Individual portraits of refugees introduce the viewer to a reality in its most haunting guise: the world seems to have reverted to primeval chaos. The film primarily translates the morally indignant tone of Levi’s memoir, dramatizing the thin line between the tragic and the grotesque through a series of unsettling, comic occurrences, intercut with black and white flashbacks of Auschwitz. What attracted Rosi to this particular text were certain features of the novel. The most obvious of these is that, unlike other Holocaust stories that recount the brutality committed during camp internment, La tregua focuses on depicting the trials that actual freedom brings to the survivors. Indeed, freedom marks a turning point in the prisoners’ existence, because, as Levi writes, “di fronte alla libertà ci sentivamo smarriti, svuotati, atrofizzati, disadatti alla nostra parte” [face to face with freedom we felt lost, emptied, atrophied, unfit for our part] (Levi 1963, 13). A second point is the recognition of what Levi (a scientist with a literary and philosophical formation) finds meaningful for us, the readers: i.e. the requirements that should be met in order to become human. In the opening shots, we witness the Germans burning the camp, hastily executing prisoners, and trying to destroy all existing evidence. 14

“La tregua,” Archive Collection.

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Rosi sets up the scene by superimposing a written text over these images, thus identifying the context of the historical reference.15 After this opening montage, the director cuts to a stark, grey dawn showing an abandoned camp. The film gradually takes on a bi-chromatic tonality: the white of the snow, the four Russian cavalrymen appearing on the horizon against a foggy grey sky (shot with a telephoto lens), and the red insignia that stand out from their uniforms. They slowly move towards the main camp and tear down its front gates, in a low camera angle. The exhausted prisoners slowly make their way out to freedom. Soon afterwards, they spot the Red Army approaching with horses and tanks. At this confusing time, the frightened prisoners return to the camp for shelter. But Levi stands at the gate and witnesses this historical moment. At this point, Primo’s voiceover is introduced, describing his inner thoughts, symptomatic of what is to come in the film: an eyewitness account of facts, which follows a chronological order. From now on, the spectator is constantly made to participate in what the grave gaze that encompasses the character’s reflective eye. We plunge into the past from the vantage point of its outcome, and, more precisely, from the survival of its author. It is the gaze of Primo’s character, in his expectation of reaching his goal, his home, that transforms the spectators into participants. The camera follows the protagonist “entrusting all the desperation of debasement at the hands of Man to his eyes” (Bruno 188). Rosi reduces Levi/Turturro’s dialogue to a minimum, as though to enhance the poetic power of the filmic image. It is in silence that one of the film’s most talked about (and reinvented) scenes unfolds: the German kneeling before Levi at the Monaco train station, when he sees the star of David shining out of his jacket. If the writer schematizes his existential relationship with that “folla anomala di visi sigillati,” [anomalous crowd of sealed faces] (251) with the suspension of a judgment, for Rosi, this symbolic gesture falls within the contemporary milieu that underlies his film. He notes: “l’ufficiale tedesco si mette in ginocchio sotto il peso dello sguardo implacabilmente accusatore di Levi. Il gesto sta a significare una ammissione di colpa” [the German officer kneels under the weight of the accusing gaze of Levi. This

15

Initially, Rosi intended to begin his film with “un rapido montaggio di immagini di repertorio, di fotografie e di fiction [...] documenta a lampi la situazione della seconda guerra mondiale in Europa, a partire dall’aggressione della Polonia nel settembre del 1939.” [A rapid montage of images, consisting of photographs and reconstructed scenes (...) documenting the time capsule of the Second World War in flashes, beginning with the invasion of Poland in September 1939] (“La tregua,” Archival Collection).

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gesture symbolizes an admission of guilt]16 Rosi was inspired by a photograph of the German Chancellor Willy Brandt in front of a memorial dedicated to the victims of the Warsaw ghetto. The film also characterizes a number of the memorable companions Levi incisively wrote about. It imaginatively portrays those moments when the Holocaust survivors re-experience the beauty of nature and music, as well as such essential human needs as humour, love, and brotherhood. Emotions such as happiness and unexplainable euphoria become inseparable from their natural state of inner re-birth. Moments of peace are possible whenever the mind is “silenced,” at times triggered by great beauty, at others, by physical exertion or impending danger. The picaresque Cesare, one of Levi’s privileged friends, stands out because of his gift for daring, wit, and mimicry. Exemplary is the episode of refugees trying to exchange a shirt for a hen, when Cesare resorts to onomatopoeia (cluck, cluck, coccodè,) and gestures (crouching on the ground, pecking randomly, using his hands as a beak) in order to reproduce the mannerisms of the chicken, and in doing so easily fools the slow-witted peasants. Besides such scenes rich with a powerful, comical force, Rosi’s film suggests, as afore cited, a political allegory for the future. We can detect its earliest signs in Levi’s description of organized life in the postAuschwitz period, as he introduces the Katowice resettlement camp, a sort of political fairyland. Mordo Nahum, known as “Il Greco” [The Greek], embodies a kind of post-war cynicism. In the end, while he is able to return to Greece, Primo must remain behind: in contrast with Greece—one of the founding countries of the United Nations—Italy only joined it in 1955. This reference to the UN signals the author’s shift from the emotional and existential transformation of the survivor to a global concern for the future. His mission, as a witness, becomes a necessity for Levi; and the words of Il Greco “La guerre n’est pas finie” [war is not over] (Levi 1963, 61) ascribe the paradoxical historical situation to a suspended moment of “truce.” On one hand, Francesco Rosi’s cinematic adaptation ascribes Primo’s picaresque odyssey to the ordinary level of a return to life, an aching story of the springtime of freedom; on the other hand, it translates the moral indignation of the narrator that a greater barbarity is forgetting. A literary experience of this sort could not fail to leave its traces in the long gestation of Rosi’s cinematic project. If we look at the first draft for the screenplay, 16

“La tregua,” hand notes 2 (Archival Collection). As Jean Gili has observed, the message of the film is exhausted here—in the figure of a man who takes upon himself the tragedy of an entire people guilty, before history, of crimes against humanity (7).

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the director is inclined towards an ending painfully close to the biographical sphere: Dopo la “speranza” costituita dal crollo del muro di Berlino, l’Europa continua a essere dilaniata e prostrata da divisioni, guerre ecc. Lui torna a casa... Lui a letto. Caffè-latte, pane, madre (la scena del sogno). Bussano. Lui sul pianerottolo. Controcampo: Primo Levi anziano. Tromba delle scale. 17 After the “hope” built up by the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Europe continues to be torn and ravaged by divisions, wars, etc. He returns to his house... He is in bed. Coffee, bread, his mother (the dream scene). A knock at the door. He is on the landing. Reverse shot: an old Primo Levi. He falls down the well of the elevator.

However, in the treatment of La tregua sent to one of its producers, Leo Pescarolo, the director emphasizes the photographic inserts of the contemporary historical-political reality: Immagini di repertorio del crollo del muro di Berlino e repertorio di attualità dei nostri giorni testimoniano lo sconcerto, la condanna, la paura: ovunque nel mondo, dall’America alla Russia, dalla Bosnia alla Croazia, alla Serbia, dalla Germania ai Balcani, dall’India al Medio Oriente, esplode ancora l’odio razzista. 18 Stock images of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and images of our own times attest to bewilderment, condemnation, and fear: everywhere in the world, from America to Russia, from Bosnia to Croatia to Serbia, from Germany to the Balkans, from India to the Middle East, racist hatred still explodes.

In the film’s final scene, however, Rosi eliminates historical footage. Instead he focuses on the image of Primo tearing off a piece of bread: this simple action (the bowl of milk is Rosi´s favourite memory from childhood) liberates the individual from the bondage of the past. In this 17

Cited from “’La tregua.’ Scalettone e appunti di base per adattamento” (Archival Collection). 18 Cited from “’La tregua.’ Soggetto cinematografico di Francesco Rosi” 16 (Archival Collection). Millicent Marcus has recently argued that “it took the end of the Cold War to make possible a new Italian historiography that would accommodate the Shoah,” and that Rosi’s film stands at the cusp of this transformation (2007, 80).

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powerful gesture, the imaginative element prevails over the historical situation.19 Rosi’s La tregua affirms the importance of memory as a vehicle for building the future based on a traumatic event, a collective act that aspires to ward off an ever-latent metaphysical event (absolute evil). In Levi’s final chapter, there is a sense of slight freedom achieved, but there is also Primo’s complex state of the soul: a sense of terrible indeterminacy marked by the recurring dream of the Lager, always present in him. In Rosi’s film, the last shots of Primo/Turturro looking directly into the camera lens translate the silent massacre of Auschwitz into a political vigilance: they affirm his true self against the dominion of barbarity and chaos.

Works Cited Alphen, Ernst van. 2002. Caught by Images: Visual Imprints in Holocaust Testimonies. In Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust. Ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz, 97—113. Bloomington-Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Bruno, Edoardo. 1997. Il percorso dell’erranza. Filmcritica 47: 188—189. Camon, Ferdinando. 1991. Conversazione con Primo Levi. Milan: Garzanti. Codelli, Lorenzo. 1997. Entretien avec Francesco Rosi: une lumière dans un moment très sombre. Positif 441: 9—14. Colombo, Furio. 1996. Primo Levi lo scrittore del silenzio. La Repubblica, December 21: 39. Cortellazzo, Sara, and Dario Tomasi. 1998. Letteratura e cinema. Bari: Laterza. De Filippo, Pasquale. 1997. Primo Levi, il testimone di quelli che non tornarono. La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno (Bari), December 10: 3. Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven. 1996. Representing Auschwitz. History and Memory 7, 2: 121—54. 19

In the original treatment, Rosi conceives this scene quite differently: “Primo si siede; gli portano una ciotola fumante di caffelatte e del pane morbido bianco. Immerge il pane nel latte. Al momento in cui porta il pane alla bocca, si odono improvvisi e fortissimi alcuni colpi alla porta e comandi militari urlati in lingue diverse” [Primo sits down; he is brought a hot bowl of caffelatte with a soft white loaf of bread. He soaks a piece of the bread in the milk. As he is about to bite into it, he hears sudden laud knocks at the door, followed by a series of military orders shouted in various languages]. “‘La tregua.’ Soggetto cinematografico di Francesco Rosi” 16 (Archival Collection).

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Gili, Jean. 1997. La Trêve. Positif 441: 6—8. Insdorf, Annette. 1989. Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Kezich, Tullio. 1997. 1945, fuga da Auschwitz, Rosi racconta Levi. Corriere della Sera, February 11: 35. Lang, Berel. 2000. Holocaust Representation: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics. Baltimore-London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Levi, Primo. 1958. Se questo è un uomo. Turin: Einaudi. —. 1963. La tregua. Turin: Einaudi. —. Rivisitando i lager. 1985. Exhibition Catalogue. Milan: Galleria San Fedele. Mancino, Anton Giulio and Sandro Zambetti. 1998. Francesco Rosi. Milan: Il Castoro. Marcus, Millicent. 2007. Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz. Toronto-Buffalo-London: Toronto University Press. —. 2002. After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postomodern Age. Baltimore-London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rosi, Francesco. 1997. La tregua non è rosa. La Repubblica, June 6: 47. —. 1996. Il mio modo di fare cinema. La città nuova 10: 103—10. Segre, Cesare. 1990. Primo Levi nella Torre di Babele. In Primo Levi as Witness. Ed. Pietro Frassica, 86—97. Fiesole (Florence): Casalini Libri. —. 1997. “La tregua?” Caro Rosi, proprio non ci siamo. Corriere della Sera, February 28: 31. Wiesel, Elie. 1983. Forward to Indelible Shadows. Film and the Holocaust by Annette Insdorf, xi—xii. New York: Random House.

SECTION 3: BETRAYAL

ENGENDERING FIDELITY: THE FILM ADAPTATION OF PAVESE’S TRA DONNE SOLE VALERIE A. MIRSHAK, DUKE UNIVERSITY

Despite the proliferation of film adaptation theory published over the last decade, surprisingly little work has been done on the more specific topic of gendered film adaptation. Given the importance of such an inquiry to both the fields of adaptation theory and women’s studies, it is remarkable that no studies have interrogated the alterations a story undergoes as it passes through the hands of a male novelist, a female screenplay writer, and a male director. A case in point is Le amiche [The Girlfriends], Michelangelo Antonioni’s cinematic adaptation of Cesare Pavese’s Tra donne sole [Among Women Only]. Tra donne sole, published in 1949 and set against the turbulent social climate of post-war Turin, explores the complex relationships among five women as seen through the eyes of its female protagonist, Clelia. The film adaptation Le amiche was directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and released to Italian theaters in 1955. Interestingly, Antonioni specifically chose two women, Alba de Céspedes and Suso Cecchi d’Amico, to pen the screenplay adaptation of Pavese’s novel because he believed they would be more “sensibili” [sensitive] in their handling of the story (Istituto d’Istruzione Superiore Stanga). Of course, this kind of affirmation leads one to wonder to whom Antonioni wished these two women to be “sensitive”. One often assumes that screenplay writers are to be faithful to the novel they are adapting; however, Antonioni’s choice here implies that he expected the writers, as women, to be faithful to the female characters of the novel. Yet outside of a Pirandellian world in which characters can come into being aside from the author’s will, such an approach to the development of Le amiche provides a novel look at the interplay of gender and fidelity in the field of adaptation. In the case of Tra donne sole and its filmic counterpart Le amiche, both the author of the original novel and the film’s director are male, while the two screenplay writers are female. Therefore, a study of Le amiche as a “gendered” adaptation must first break from the traditional auteur cult that

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has guided film studies almost since their inception in academia, and to instead view the film as a collaborative work. Although an auteur-based study is certainly a valid approach to film analysis, some critics have recently begun to question this narrow focus on the director’s role in filmmaking and now seek to reinstate the study of a film’s production in its entirety.1 Certainly, the screenplay writer is as much an “author” of an adaptation as are the writer of the original literary text and the film’s director. In the case of Le amiche, Brunetta believes that Antonioni followed the script provided him by de Céspedes and d’Amico in a very scrupulous way (Brunetta 1970, 142). In fact, according to Seymour Chatman, this seems to be the last time Antonioni stuck to a screenplay with only minimal interventions on his part (Chatman 1985, 34). Given that the storytelling first shifts from male author to female author, the script for Antonioni’s Le amiche as conceived by the female novelist Alba de Céspedes provides an ideal starting point for a case study of Le amiche as an illustration of gendered film adaptation. As noted above, de Céspedes collaborated with the prolific screenwriter Suso Cecchi d’Amico to produce the final screenplay version of Pavese’s novel. While d’Amico was in charge of outlining the basic psychologies of the film’s characters, de Céspedes developed the bulk of the script’s dialogue (Baldelli 1969, 181). Since the dialogue exchanged between the female characters of the film is of principal interest here, this study relies on the original manuscripts for the screenplay currently held in the archives of Alba de Céspedes. In turn, an exploration of Antonioni’s final film product as it relates to the original screenplay drafts proves revealing as the narrative changes hands yet again, going from a female storyteller back to a male one. By analyzing the ways in which men and women tell and retell the same story, some of the defining issues of feminist literary theory are brought to light, such as the possibility that sexual difference leaves a 1

Suso Cecchi d’Amico herself, when asked who she believes to be the true author of a film, replies: “Il cinema è opera di collaborazione. Su questo punto ogni discussione mi sembra oramai superflua” [Cinema is a work of collaboration. On this point, every argument now seems superfluous] (Francione 2002, 47). This and all following English translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own. See MacFarlane on the importance of the screenwriter to the production of a cinematic adaptation (MacFarlane 1996, 35). And specific to the study of Le amiche, Brunetta states: “in un’opera cinematografica bisogna tener conto della responsabilità e del peso dei collaboratori alla sceneggiatura (in questo caso Alba de Céspedes e Suso Cecchi d’Amico)” [in a cinematic work, one must consider the responsibility and the weight of the screenplay collaborators (in this case Alba de Céspedes and Suso Cecchi d’Amico)] (Brunetta 1970, 126).

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discernable imprint on translated and adapted texts, as well as the implications this difference may hold for the fidelity discourse so loved and hated by theorists of filmic adaptation. Although the raw material available for analysis in de Céspedes’ dialogues for Le amiche is extensive, this essay highlights just a few salient examples of the significant changes the female author enacted on the male-penned novel Tra donne sole. All of these scenes place their focus on the importance of cultivating meaningful connections and relationships among women, a concept which is conspicuously absent from the novel as written by Cesare Pavese. In fact, Tra donne sole centers on a purely existential crisis; more than individuals, the female protagonists of the novel seem to represent various elements of a universal human malaise. Almost nowhere in the novel does the reader get the impression that the characters are living an experience specific to their gendered, sexual role— in fact, this lack of specificity has led many critics to insist that the novel is no more than a thinly veiled autobiography.2 In her screenplay adaptation of the work, however, Alba de Céspedes effectively shifts the story’s focus from a generalization of human struggle to the depiction of a specifically female experience. Of course, the simple fact that de Céspedes enacts certain changes on Pavese’s novel is not remarkable. Since a certain amount of metamorphosis is inevitable when adapting a literary text to screen, Robert Stam claims that the term “translation” provides an appropriate description of cinematic adaptation.3 In an analysis of the significance of textual alterations, one must determine what type of element has been transformed. As narrative is the element of a written text most easily transferred to screenplay form and not usually in need of “adaptation

2

This theory is based mostly on the similarities between Rosetta’s suicide and that of the author. However, Clelia is also considered to resemble Pavese. The most emphatic criticism of this type comes from Italo Calvino, who claims: “La cosa che scombussola di più è quella donna-cavallo pelosa, con la voce cavernosa e l’alito che sa di pipa, che parla in prima persona e fin da principio si capisce che sei tu con la parrucca e i seni finti [The thing that upsets me the most is that hairy horse-woman with the cavernous voice and the pipe-smoker’s breath, speaking in first-person, who since the beginning one understands is you with a wig and false breasts] Calvino makes this claim in a letter to Pavese dated Sanremo, 27 July 1949 (Pavese 1998, v); English translation from Binetti 2003, 201. 3 “The trope of adaptation as translation suggests a principled effort of intersemiotic transposition, with the inevitable losses and gains typical of any translation” (Stam 2000, 62).

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proper”,4 such alterations in the narrative plot often provide clues regarding the interpretation of one writer’s work by another writer. Stam emphasizes this aspect of cinematic adaptation when he affirms that critics ought to view these works in relation to the hypotext5 as “readings, critiques, interpretations, rewritings” and even as “specific dialogical responses” (Stam 2005, 5). In following, it is illuminating to examine de Céspedes’ adaptation of Tra donne sole as a “dialogical response” to Pavese, as well as Antonioni’s completed film as a response to both Pavese and the screenwriters. From the outset of de Céspedes’ manuscripts for the screenplay, it is clear that her response seeks to draw Pavese’s female characters out of their solitude and to instead establish closer ties among them. In one of the screenplay’s opening scenes, Clelia and Momina share a moment “among women only” as they discuss various beauty treatments, offering the reader a first glimpse of the personal connection between the two women that will continue to develop as the story progresses. Following this intimate conversation, according to the screenplay, the women seem to have become “amiche” [friends] (de Céspedes archives). Significantly, this scene does not appear in Pavese’s Tra donne sole; rather, it is original to the screenplay. In the novel, only fleeting references are made to the female protagonists’ toilette. Not only do Clelia and Momina never share this particular moment of exchanging cosmetic advice, but the only mention of beauty products in the novel can be accurately described as seeming “forced.”6 In addition, in contrast to the scene of quick camaraderie

4

As opposed to the element of enunciation; i.e. utterance, discourse, etc. (MacFarlane 1996, 12—13). 5 Genette’s term hypotext, indicating a text that comes before and influences another, is employed in adaptation theory by Stam (see Stam 2000, 66). 6 “Forced”: here I use a word employed by one of my students, KeriAnn White, to describe this instance in the text. At this point in Tra donne sole, Clelia and Momina take a day trip with friends to the country and the group decides to stay overnight in a hotel. As the two women settle into their room, Clelia, the firstperson narrator, explains: “Ma c’eravamo appena tolta la pelliccia e bagnate le mani (Momina nella borsetta portava crema e profumo) che s’aprí la porta” [We had hardly taken off our furs and washed (Momina had cold cream and perfume in her bag) when the door opened] (Pavese 1998, 72—73); English translation from Paige 1980, 92. Here, Pavese’s reference to beauty products seems superfluous to the narrative (as evidenced by the author’s own use of parenthesis) and generally out of place in the text. Indeed, this passing reference to “crema e profumo” may be interpreted as an attempt by the author to infuse his writing with a feminine sensibility he felt would lend credence to the female-centered story. After all, he

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presented by de Céspedes, in Pavese’s novel, Clelia and Momina first encounter one another at a party where they share only a brief conversational exchange. Given that the narrative shift de Céspedes performs on Pavese’s text is not a necessary change warranted by the transition from paper to screen, it may certainly be explored as a “reading, critique, interpretation, [and] rewriting” of as well as a “response” to Tra donne sole. Whereas Pavese pens a novel emphasizing the inability of his five female characters to create authentic bonds of friendship, de Céspedes presents the reader of the screenplay with a different twist on the story. The seemingly natural connection between women revealed in the early scene between Clelia and Momina develops into a central theme in the filmic adaptation, as evidenced by the change in title to Le amiche. 7 It bears noting here that the English translation of Pavese’s novel as Among Women Only belies the significance of such a modification in the title. Pavese’s original title, Tra donne sole, can in fact be read several ways in Italian: as Among Women Only, the title which it is given in Paige’s well-known translation, and also as Among Women Alone or Among Lonely Women. This last title is the most appropriate, given the main characters’ inability to cultivate intimate friendships—an inability that ultimately leads to the desperate suicide of Rosetta, perhaps the loneliest of all the five women. Although the film adaptation of the novel retains this tragic ending, it replaces Rosetta’s existential angst as the cause of her suicide with the more traditional filmic motive of abandonment by a lover.8 De Céspedes and d’Amico, collaborating on the screenplay, effectively change the tone of the story to reflect their new title, Le amiche. In addition to the “beauty talk” between Clelia and Momina, several other scenes original to de Céspedes’ version of Le amiche highlight the likely foresaw the assumption by many critics that the novel was, in many respects, simply an autobiography told under the guise of female characters (see note 2). 7 Interpretation of the film’s title has varied among critics. For example, Brunetta reads the title as an ironic comment on the false value of collective experience (Brunetta 1970, 142). In contrast, Carlo Madrignani views the film as an account of the lives of women who are more “benevolent and progressive” than their novelistic counterparts—women whom he views as “friends in the most obvious and integrated sense” (Madrignani 1983, 134). Likewise, Lucia Re credits Antonioni, d’Amico and de Céspedes with granting the Pavese’s women authentic and intimate female friendships (Re 1999). 8 However, Antonioni does claim that this “new” motive remains true to the spirit of Pavese’s novel, viewing the failed love affair as the final straw in a boredom with living (Antonioni 1956, 88).

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need for developing and nurturing a sense of community among women. Following Rosetta’s suicide in the screenplay, an emotional Clelia lashes out at Momina and the clientele of the dress shop, blaming them all for the feelings of isolation and helplessness that led to the young girl’s death. As a result of this outburst, Clelia’s boss suggests that she transfer to another shop in Rome because she would have a hard time continuing to work in Turin. This scene in de Céspedes’ original draft is quite lengthy and includes an earnest conversation between Clelia and her (female) boss regarding the need for women to pull together in order to survive in the public sphere. In addition to generously offering to transfer Clelia to Rome (when she could have easily fired her for her public denunciation of their wealthy clients), her boss even goes so far as to explain her reasons for helping her, saying: “Le donne quando aiutano un’altra donna è segno che vogliono aiutare anche se stesse, difendere le proprie ragioni” [When women help another woman, it’s a sign that they want to help themselves too, defend their own rights] (de Céspedes archives, fasc. 3). The relationship between Clelia and her boss in Pavese’s novel is scarcely mentioned, and strictly professional in nature. However, with just this single scene, de Céspedes transforms their relationship into a critical aspect of the screenplay.9 When viewed through the eyes of a woman writer, their connection becomes akin to the bond that Janet Todd labels a “social friendship,” which she describes as “a nurturing tie, not pitting women against society but rather smoothing their passage within it” (Todd 1980, 4). By sharing her own experience and personal struggle with her employee, Clelia’s boss establishes a bond between the two women that will aide them in their personal and professional journeys. Much in the way that de Céspedes makes Clelia’s boss into a mentor for the protagonist, she creates a similar relationship between Clelia and a thirteen-year-old girl who serves as a sort of “gofer” for the dress shop. This young girl appears to be an invention of the screenplay writer, as no such character exists in the novel Tra donne sole. In de Céspedes’ draft of the screenplay, Clelia and the shop girl share a noteworthy scene together.

9

Although these particular lines are absent from the final film version of Le amiche, Antonioni does retain the intimate scene between Clelia and her boss, prompting Lucia Re to note the contrast of this scene with Pavese; while the author of Tra donne sole tended to virilize working women, Antonioni and his screenwriters “insist on the availability of a supportive feminine model for Clelia”; also, “This dialogue between women working together offers a glimpse of the possibility of intimacy and understanding, a reaching out to one another that reverses the essential solitude of Pavese’s Clelia” (Re 1999, 110).

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Here, Clelia asks the girl if she would like to be a model someday, and the following exchange ensues: RAGAZZINA No, quelle i vestiti debbono lasciarli a negozio. Io voglio averli a casa per fare rabbia alle mie amiche del cortile. Sono cattiva, io, mio padre dice che sono tremenda. CLELIA No, tutti i padri dicono così e ben poche donne avrebbero fatto strada se non avessero dovuto fare rabbia a qualcuno…(de Céspedes archives, fasc. 3). GIRL No, they have to leave the dresses at the store. I want to have them at home to make my girlfriends in the neighborhood angry. I’m mean; my father says that I’m dreadful. CLELIA No, all fathers say that, and very few women would have been successful if they hadn’t had to make someone angry…

Once more, de Céspedes creates a situation in which one professional woman serves in a mentor capacity towards a younger woman. Clelia has learned by experience that working women often face an uphill battle for acceptance in their society, and her transmission of the knowledge she has gained to the young girl reflects Clelia’s desire to help her realize her potential. As these scenes demonstrate, the screenplay emphasizes cooperation and interconnectedness between women as paramount to the female experience, in contrast to the profound sense of loneliness prevalent in the male-authored novel. One can certainly argue that the newly-injected presence of a cohesive female community in Le amiche represents a philosophical shift from the story as it is presented in the original text. Given the circumstances of the novel’s adaptation, it is useful to explore the possibility that these textual divergences result from the difference in gender of the two authors. According to theorist Liliana Sikorska, “[t]he difference pertaining to gender-oriented perception of the world largely influences the process of translation” (Sikorska 1994, 180). Sikorska is not alone in her thinking; in fact, the idea that gender directly affects the ways in which men and women translate has been the object of much study in recent years (von Flotow 1991, 69—84; de Lobitniere-Harwood 1991; Chamberlain 1988, 454—472). Thus far, it has been established that one particular male author— Pavese—and his female translator—de Céspedes—do in fact “write differently”, as feminist literary critics would say. Interestingly, current trends in theories of sexual difference lend support to the hypothesis that sexual difference can indeed be credited (or blamed, depending on one’s perspective) for these textual divergences. Numerous theorists assert that

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there exists a distinction between male and female approaches to philosophical thought, claiming that the former tends to totalize or universalize concepts while the latter is more likely to be rooted in a concrete, lived experience.10 As a result of this focus on the realm of immanence, “female philosophy” is more inclined to privilege the relationships and connections among women (and men) over a more generalized view of a universal humanity. Applying this theory of sexual difference to an analysis of Pavese’s Tra donne sole and de Céspedes’ draft of Le amiche produces noteworthy results. On the one hand, Pavese’s novel centers on a universal existential dilemma. In many ways, the characters of the novel seem nothing more than the portraits of a generalized human malaise. In contrast, the world de Céspedes creates for Clelia and her friends is grounded in an immanent, lived experience. Her characters’ lives are inextricably bound up in their relationships with one another. Their ability to work, their handling of love relationships, their very being in society are all closely tied to their interactions with one another. In the transition from Tra donne sole to Le amiche, a philosophy of transcendence becomes one of immanence. Therefore, de Céspedes’ translation of Pavese’s novel supports the claim of Susanne de Lobitniere-Harwood that rewriting in the feminine is essentially “taking women’s experience as [a] starting point” (de Lobitniere-Harwood 1991, 166). It was clearly the benefit that this personal experience would bring to a women-centered film that Antonioni had in mind when he asked Alba de Céspedes and Suso Cecchi d’Amico to pen the screenplay for Le amiche.11 In fact, the director emphasized a reliance on concrete, lived experience as a key element distinguishing his approach to art from that of Pavese.12 10

“In any given society, feminine personality comes to define itself in relation and connection to other people more than masculine personality does” (Chodorow 1974, 44). “My experience as a woman demonstrates, as does my analysis of the language of women and men, that women almost always privilege the relationship between subjects” (Irigaray 2001, 17). Both of these scholars are cited by William Egginton, who thus concludes: “what we call being ‘man’ is predicated on a relation to meaning that is transcendental; what we call being woman is predicated on a relation to meaning that is immanent” (Egginton 2006, 131). 11 “What Antonioni expected from his collaborators above all was their own experiences” (Leprohon 1963, 42). 12 “La sua—di Pavese—conoscenza degli uomini e delle donne più che una conoscenza reale era astratta, poetica. Le mie impressioni vengono sempre dai fatti, da dati precisi della realtà” [His—Pavese’s—knowledge of men and women, more than a real knowledge, was abstract, poetic. My impressions always come from the facts, from precise facts of reality] (Baldelli 1961, 187).

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With this declaration, Antonioni claims to privilege the immanent over the transcendent, aligning himself with what may be called a primarily “feminine” philosophy.13 However, in addition to his reliance on the experiences of his screenplay writers, Antonioni also closely guided the two women in their retelling of the story (Leprohon 1963, 42). Given that the male director exerted ultimate creative power over the final film product, an analysis of the additional, final shift in perspective that Pavese’s story underwent as it was taken from paper to screen proves illuminating. Significantly, Antonioni retained the majority of scenes invented by d’Amico and de Céspedes, and made very few additions (most notably, the beach excursion sequence). For example, the aforementioned scene in which Clelia and Momina befriend one another as they share beauty advice is featured in the final film, though in a much abbreviated form. Similarly, a shorter “heart-to-heart” talk between Clelia and her boss is present in the screen version of the story. However, all of the scenes featuring dialogue between Clelia and the shop girl were cut from the film. Perhaps even more telling than the inclusion or exclusion of particular scenes is the use Antonioni makes of the camera, an instrument unique to the director. Antonioni’s framing is never casual; instead each shot is carefully planned and executed to reveal the scene in a specific light. In fact, Lucia Re highlights the importance of the director’s use of framing in Le amiche: The complexity of Antonioni’s visual composition, his framing of the characters in the architectural and natural landscape and his orchestration of their movements create a visual rhythm and a design that convey the essence of the story and characters with almost no need for dialogue (Re 1999, 106).

Early in Le amiche, the director frames his subjects in a way that reflects their burgeoning friendship: Clelia and Momina stand closely side by side at Clelia’s vanity table as they laugh and converse at their first meeting. A little later in the film, the protagonist meets Nene at the art gallery and begins to talk earnestly with both her and Momina, declaring: “mi sembra di avervi sempre conosciute […] mi sembra logico che dobbiamo farci delle confidenze” [it seems to me that I’ve always known you (…) it seems logical that we should confide in one another] (Antonioni 1998, 185). As she expresses this “natural” sense of familiarity with the two 13 Brunette, who points out that Antonioni’s films have been said to reveal a “feminine temperament” (Brunette 1998, 10).

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women, Clelia is standing in front of a large painting of three women seemingly engaged in intimate conversation. As Le amiche progresses, this easy and relaxed intimacy begins to alternate with a recurring sense of separation and distance. The first sign of this shift takes place with the group excursion to the beach, a sequence often praised by critics for Antonioni’s innovative style and skillful ensemble direction. The opening scene of the sequence features a shot of the five women standing on a terrace overlooking the ocean; it is later revealed that Lorenzo is perched on a deck far above them, leading Chatman to point out that “[t]he shot visually embodies the separateness of the women’s world, which ultimately is closed to men” (Chatman 1985, 37). Given the positioning of the women on the terrace, it may also be argued that the shot embodies separateness within the women’s world. Instead of standing grouped together, the women are spread out to five distinct points on the terrace, forming an almost geometric pattern to the spectator, who witnesses the scene from above. A similar geometry is present in the shot that immediately follows as Nene, Clelia and Momina descend from the terrace onto a lower look-out point. Again, the women move separately and not as a group, creating the three points of a triangle on the screen. Throughout this sequence, the women physically draw close to one another only to separate again almost immediately, reflecting the ease with which they forge—and fracture—their personal relationships with one another in the film. These shots, set against the bleak, deserted winter oceanfront, establish the tone for the entire beach sequence as their emphasis on physical distance prefigures the emotional distance that will overcome the women as the drama of their day at the beach unfolds. As a result, the spectator is not surprised when the scene concludes with a vituperative fight between three of the women. Antonioni immediately follows this dramatic sequence with a scene that emphasizes Clelia’s efforts to recuperate the friendship that has been lost among the women. The protagonist decides to accompany Rosetta on the train back to Turin in an attempt to lend her support and friendship to the troubled young woman. Antonioni deftly frames the scenes on the train to reflect the shift in tone: here, as a sense of intimacy returns and Rosetta begins to confide in Clelia, the two women are framed first by the door to their train compartment and then by the train’s narrow corridor. This physical closeness, emphasized even more as Clelia rests a comforting hand on Rosetta’s shoulder, provides the spectator with a visual illustration of Clelia’s belief that “non si può fare a meno degli altri” [One cannot make it in life without other people] (Antonioni 1998, 201). Midway through their conversation, the two women walk down the

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corridor, passing a compartment full of schoolgirls giggling and teasing one another. Like the painting framing Clelia in the art gallery, these girls provide a backdrop that reinforces the tone of familiarity that characterizes this sequence. However, it is a familiarity and an intimacy that cannot be maintained by the female protagonists of the film. Again, Antonioni’s use of framing provides insight into the contradictory relationships among them. Meeting in Momina’s apartment several days after their beach excursion, the five women are viewed in one last ensemble shot. The tone is easy and familiar once more as all of the women gather around the sofa, drinking tea, chatting and laughing together. When Rosetta enters Momina’s bedroom to comb her hair, Momina follows her and the two are then viewed through a window in the door dividing the bedroom from the sitting area where the others remain in conversation. As the women are viewed through the uncovered window, unity is maintained between the five friends. Moments later, Clelia enters the bedroom and, when she learns of Rosetta’s affair with Nene’s husband, she promptly closes the blinds on the window. One friend has betrayed another, demonstrated visually by the sudden physical separation the blinds impose between the women. Notably, Le amiche contains no further ensemble shots of all five women in one frame. With his precise use of visual framing, Antonioni brilliantly illustrates the vacillations the women’s relationships undergo as they struggle, and ultimately fail, to maintain intimate connections with one another. In this respect, the director seems able to stay faithful to Pavese and his female screenwriters at the same time. For although the attempt at creating strong friendships among women retains its importance in Le amiche, key scenes from de Céspedes’ scripts which ground the story in a concretely female experience—most notably the mentor relationships established in the dress shop—never made it past Antonioni’s final editing of the film. As a result, in Le amiche the story of the five women remains just abstract enough to apply to an entire social class, to both its women and men. Indeed, Peter Brunette finds this to be the case in many of Antonioni’s films: “whatever attention Antonioni pays to women is usually seen as part of a more general critique and not as a specific concern with women as women” (Brunette 1998, 8). In so doing, Antonioni successfully bridges the gap between the male-penned novel and its female-penned screenplay adaptation by universalizing the film’s message while at the same time granting importance to the quest for female community in the story. In conclusion, one last question remains to be addressed: is the film Le amiche faithful to Pavese’s original novel? If one is to confront the clear

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shift in philosophy from Tra donne sole to Le amiche, one must conclude that the screenplay does not reproduce the underlying essence or spirit of the original novel. In fact, true to Antonioni’s desire that his screenwriters create a script that was “sensitive” to the novel’s female characters, de Céspedes conceived a screenplay that appears to be more concerned with representing a realistic portrayal of Clelia’s lived experience than with reproducing Pavese’s novel by the letter. One may then be tempted to question whether or not a film that is faithful to the novel’s characters rather than to the novel itself can be considered a “valid” adaptation. By now the answer to this last inquiry is quite clear. Antonioni himself has declared more than once that it was never his intention to be faithful to Pavese.14 And indeed, most adaptation theorists today have agreed that it is useless to get caught up in the mire of fidelity theory. The importance of this case study of Tra donne sole and Le amiche lies in what it reveals about three diverse readings and writings of the same story by one female and two male authors. In the end, the intellectual project is better served by shifting the focus from questions of fidelity to an exploration of the nuances of intertextuality and what they demonstrate about the natural give and take of the adaptation process. As evidenced by the alterations de Céspedes and Antonioni enact on Pavese’s novel, this dynamic relationship between the hypertext and the hypotext lends fertile soil for an exploration of sexual difference and its effects on the processes of translation and adaptation.

Works Cited Antonioni, Michelangelo. 1998. “Le amiche” (screenplay). In Tra donne sole by Cesare Pavese. Turin: Einaudi. 159—255. —. Fedeltà a Pavese. Cinema nuovo 76: 88. Baldelli, Pio. 1969. Cinema dell’ambiguità. Rome: Samonà e Savelli. Binetti, Vincenzo. 2003. Contextualizing Marginality: Urban Landscape and Female Communities in Cesare Pavese’s “Among Women Only.” In Italian Women and the City, ed. Janet Levarie Smarr and Daria Valentini, 201—214. Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont. Brunetta, Gian Piero. 1970. “Le amiche:” Pavese e Antonioni dal romanzo al film. In Forma e parola nel cinema, 125—158. Padua: Liviana.

14

“Non ho mai avuto nemmeno la preoccupazione della fedeltà a Pavese” [I never had any concern about loyalty to Pavese] (Antonioni 1956, 88).

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Brunette, Peter. 1998. The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni. New York: Cambridge University Press. Chamberlain, Lori. 1988. Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation. Signs 13.3: 454—472. Chatman, Seymour. 1985. Antonioni or, the Surface of the World. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Chodorow, Nancy. 1974. Family Structure and Feminine Personality. In Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, 43—66. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. de Céspedes, Alba. N.d. Archives. Le amiche. Held by the Fondazione Elvira Badaracco at the “Unione Femminile Nazionale”, Milan. Inventory 1.4.11: “Le amiche;” envelope 1, fasc. 1—3. de Lobitniere-Harwood, Susanne. 1991. Re-belle et infidèle/ The Body Bilingual: Translating as a Rewriting in the Feminine. Toronto: Women’s Press. Egginton, William. 2006. Perversity and Ethics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Francione, Fabio, ed. 2002. Scrivere con gli occhi. Lo sceneggiatore come cineasta: Il cinema di Suso Cecchi d’Amico. Alessandria: Falsopiano. Gianetti, David. 1999. Invito al cinema di Antonioni. Milan: Mursia. Irigaray, Luce. 2001. To Be Two. New York: Routledge. Istituto d’Istruzione Superiore Stanga. Dal testo al film: “Tra donne sole” di C. Pavese, “Le amiche” di M. Antonioni. http://www.rccr.cremona.it/stanga/pavese/indexhtm.htm. Leprohon, Pierre. 1963. Michelangelo Antonioni: An Introduction. New York: Simon & Schuster. MacFarlane, Brian. 1996. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Madrignani, Carlo. 1983. Da “Tra donne sole” a “Le amiche.” In Michelangelo Antonioni: Identificazione di un autore, vol. 2, ed. Giorgio Tinazzi, 129—138. Parma: Pratiche. Pavese, Cesare. 1998. Tra donne sole. Turin: Einaudi. —. 1980. Among Women Only. Trans. D. D. Paige. London: Quartet Books. Re, Lucia. 1999. Amorous Distances: Calvino, Antonioni and Pavese’s “Tra donne sole.” In Women in Italian Cinema, ed. Tonia Caterina Riviello. Rome: Edizioni Libreria Croce. Sikorska, Liliana. 1994. Lost in the Labyrinth: Some Aspects of Difference in Translation. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 29: 179—187.

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Stam, Robert. 2005. Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation. Malden, MA.: Blackwell. —. 2000. Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation. In Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore, 54—76. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Todd, Janet. 1980. Women’s Friendships in Literature. Guilford, NY: Columbia University Press. von Flotow, Luise. 1991. Feminist Translation: Contexts, Practices and Theories. TTR 4.2: 69—84.

LOOK WHO’S TALKING: NESSUNO TORNA INDIETRO, FROM ALBA DE CÉSPEDES TO ALESSANDRO BLASETTI GLORIA MONTI, CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY

Bisogna vivere per un ideale. E bisogna saper pagare per le proprie idee. La vita deve essere un impegno altrimenti non ha senso.1 —Alba de Céspedes (Petrignani 1996, 37) .

One must live for an ideal. And one must be willing to pay for one’s ideas. Life must be about commitment or it makes no sense.

In the introduction to their anthology, Writing Beyond Fascism: Cultural Resistance in the Life and Works of Alba de Céspedes, Carole Gallucci and Ellen Nerenberg state that Alba de Céspedes wrote “against and past cultural normativity” insofar as she portrayed women whose thoughts and actions defied the parameters of what was considered appropriate female conduct (2000, 22). I will examine de Céspedes’ novel, Nessuno torna indietro [There’s No Turning Back], which challenges standards and expectations of femininity during the ventennio, the period of fascist rule, a time when boundaries of acceptable behaviors for women were dictated by fascist ideology in the words of Victoria De Grazia, “how fascism ruled women”. Moreover, I will analyze the film version of the novel directed by Alessandro Blasetti, who also co-wrote the screenplay with de I would like to thank four individuals for the invaluable help they provided during the writing of this essay. For their careful reading and editorial remarks, my gratitude goes to Dr. Robert Cagle, Richard Gore, and Christopher White. Special thanks to my father, Mario Monti, whose countless first person accounts of life under fascism gave me an understanding of this troubled time in the history of Italy beyond what books tell. 1 Translations from Italian to English are mine except for Jan Nobles’ translation of Nessuno torna indietro.

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Céspedes. If the collaboration between a notorious antifascist writer and one of the most recognizable cinematic figures under fascism, arguably its intellectual voice, might appear contradictory, I will reconcile de Céspedes’ and Blasetti’s political views by tracing the ideological transformation that Blasetti experienced throughout the ventennio, which led to his progressive distancing from fascism. Published in 1938, Nessuno torna indietro chronicles the lives of eight female university students residing in a boarding house in Rome, between 1934 and 1936. Although the film was shot in 1942-1943, its completion was delayed by the end of the fascist regime and the subsequent civil war in 1943. The film was not released until the end of the war, in 1945. By 1942, when filming started, Blasetti was no longer a member of the Fascist Party. However, scholarly works on Blasetti often dismiss his political development and unproblematically categorize him as a fascist director.2 Instead, I propose that the existing discrepancies between the literary voice of de Céspedes and the cinematic voice of Blasetti are motivated by gender rather than politics. I will examine in detail a single character, Xenia, as a case study to illustrate the differences between the novel and the film. A large body of scholarly work dedicated to the analysis of de Céspedes’ challenge of standards and expectations of femininity set by the fascist belief system, whereby women’s primary duty was to fulfill their domestic roles as wives and mothers (known as “sposa e madre esemplare” [perfect wife and mother]) exists (Vitti-Alexander 1991, Nerenberg 1991, Gallucci 1995, Carletti 1998, De Giorgio 2000, Pickering-Iazzi 2000, Carletti 2000, and Ferme 2006). De Céspedes herself recognized the transgressive quality of her writings: “Ho avuto molti guai nel periodo fascista. Tutto di me fu proibito” [I endured many troubles during fascism. All my work was forbidden] (Petrignani 1996, 40). However, her troubles with the regime were not exclusively of a literary nature. Two separate and contradicting versions exist regarding de Céspedes’ arrest and incarceration for antifascism. According to police files, she was arrested in 1935 following the interception of phone 2

Consensus abounds on Blasetti’s fascist convictions from all sides of the political spectrum. Gian Piero Brunetta, whose book, Storia del cinema italiano is published by the leftist Editori Riuniti, describes Blasetti as a young fascist critic and a fascist militant intellectual (1993, 124, 134). A journalist for the fascistleaning newspaper Il Secolo d’Italia acclaims Blasetti as “italianissimo e fascistissimo” [the most Italian and the most fascist] (Rossi 2008, n.p). A film critic for the centrist newspaper Il Corriere della Sera asserts that Blasetti never denied his support of the regime, until the Ethiopian war (Merenghetti 2008, n.p.).

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conversations in which she made disparaging remarks about Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia (Bonsaver 2007, 253), and spent five days in a women’s prison, in Rome (Zancan 2001, 111). On the other hand, de Céspedes has provided a different account of this episode. In an interview in 1990, she recalled that when she lived in Via Eleonora Duse, between February 1941 and September 1943 (Di Nicola 2001, 112), she was under constant police surveillance and was later arrested because a notorious antifascist, unbeknown to her, had visited her home. She spent two weeks in prison. De Céspedes declared that she was always antifascist but had never exposed herself (Carroli 1993, 141). Nessuno torna indietro is de Céspedes’ most significant example of writing under and beyond fascism. The book was immensely popular and has been translated into many languages. One especially interesting feature of the novel, as a reviewer noted in 1939, is that its structure is clearly influenced by filmic techniques: “La tecnica del cinematografo [...] è stat[a] di aiuto alla scrittrice nell’alternar gli episodi” [Filmic technique greatly helped the writer juxtapose the episodes] (Zancan 2001, 133).3 The timing of this observation concerning the connection between novel and film is remarkable, considering that it was made years before the filmic adaptation came to fruition. In his book, Censorship and Literature in Fascist Italy, Guido Bonsaver explores the connection between literature and cinema in Nessuno torna indietro—he analyzes how this correlation represented a turning point in de Céspedes’ professional life. He tells how de Céspedes sold the rights to make a film, based on her novel, in 1939. In an interview in 1940, she acknowledged the cinematic value of the book (Reich 2000, 137). In 1941, the project for the screen version was set in motion under the aegis of the book’s publisher, Arnoldo Mondadori, who owned a film production company. De Céspedes was not involved in the film adaptation at the time.4

3

The reviewer undoubtedly refers to the technique of film editing: the coordination of one shot with the next. The novel employs a narrative structure that alternates the various episodes. 4 Jacqueline Reich states that de Céspedes was involved in the film production as a screenwriter from the very beginning (2000, 132).

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The book became the subject of strict censorship.5 Interestingly, it was the film project that alerted the censors in the first place, since one of its actors, Doris Duranti, was the woman for whom the Minister of Popular Culture, Alessandro Pavolini, had left his wife and children. Duranti was also a close friend of de Céspedes’. The publisher received orders to halt further printing of the novel. The official ban on Nessuno torna indietro, which also included the film rights, was issued on 27th January 1941, following the book’s 20th reprint, on 5th January 1941. Moreover, de Céspedes became the target of a slanderous campaign, which not only condemned her book as immoral, but also condemned her alleged antifascist political activities. To protect herself, de Céspedes turned to the institutional powers that had ostracized her. She requested a meeting with Mussolini, which was not granted, so she contacted Pavolini, seeking his support. More significantly, on 17th November 1941, she put forward a proposal to work on the existing screenplay of Nessuno torna indietro in order to meet the censors’ demands, so that production on the film could continue. She also agreed to change the film’s title. The outcome was positive and Mussolini himself approved the new plan for the film entitled, Pensione Grimaldi. Shooting started in 1942, under the direction of Alessandro Blasetti (Bonsaver 2007, 254—258).6 5

Disagreement surrounds the degree to which the novel was subjected to censorship, in 1940. Critics assert that the book was banned in 1940 because the censors claimed it did not reflect the “fascist ethic” (Pickering-Iazzi 2000, 85; Gallucci 1995, 200; De Giorgio 2000, 14). Yet, they provide no reference to an official document that would confirm such a claim. One must conclude that they are offering their own interpretation rather than documenting the government’s position vis-à-vis Nessuno torna indietro. Reich also states that the book was banned in 1940 but does not cite a specific reason (2000, 138). On the other hand, Bonsaver maintains that the novel faced censorship rather than an outright ban. In January 1940, the regime imposed a linguistic change to all subsequent printings, where the pronoun Voi would replace Lei in all formal modes of address appearing in the book, following a decree from 1938 (2007, 254). However, the 20th printing, published on 5 January 1941, predominantly employs the use of Lei with a couple of detours into Voi. 6 Reich’s claim that no archival materials exist to explain the change in the film’s title from Nessuno torna indietro to Pensione Grimaldi, and her educated guess that such a change was decided upon by the films’ producers (2000, 139), is contradicted by Bonsaver’s research. By providing documentation of the letter de Céspedes wrote to the Ministry of Popular Culture in 1941, he proves the crucial point that de Céspedes’ own decision to provide a new title for the film was instrumental in moving the production of the film forward. However, the film would eventually be released as Nessuno torna indietro (Reich 2000, 139).

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The Odd Couple: De Céspedes, The Antifascist and Blasetti, The Most Fascist In her essay, “Fear of Filming: Alba de Céspedes and the 1943 Film Adaptation of Nessuno torna indietro,” Jacqueline Reich describes de Céspedes’ hesitation on entering the field of screenwriting. She mentions an article de Céspedes wrote for the journal, Film in 1942, appropriately entitled, “Ho paura del cinematografo” [I am afraid of cinema], in which she explains her concerns about losing control over her work due to the collaborative nature of writing for cinema (2000, 136). It is important to note that de Céspedes’ fears specifically referred to the screen adaptation of her previously written work. De Céspedes would write two more scripts that were not adaptations of her own material, Lettere al sottotenente,7 directed by Goffredo Alessandrini, in 1945, and Le amiche [The Girlfriends], directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, in 1955. The distinction de Céspedes makes between working with her own novel rather than with original material (Lettere al sottotenente) or a short story written by somebody else (Cesare Pavese’s Le amiche) is critical for the purpose of tracing the evolution of de Céspedes’s voice from novel to film. The apprehension she expressed pertains to the loss of her literary persona as she relocated it onto the screen. De Céspedes’ uneasiness concerned the specifics of Nessuno torna indietro and not the craft of screenwriting itself, hence Reich’s subsequent question, “Why does and how does de Céspedes choose to write screenplays?” (2000, 137) becomes a non-issue. Reich concludes that de Céspedes overcame her reservations owing to “the lure of money which could buy them [the screenwriters] that ‘pezzetto di terra al mare, o in collina’” [little piece of land by the sea, or in the hills].8 Reich’s answer paints de Céspedes as a mercenary—an 7

Reich asserts that de Céspedes first screenwriting project was Lettera (sic) al sottotenente, when she was asked by the director to write a treatment for the film in 1942, and subsequently to work in partnership on the script (2000, 135). However, as I have indicated, de Céspedes first became involved in screenwriting in 1941, when she agreed to rewrite the script of Nessuno torna indietro. Also, de Céspedes describes the work Io, suo padre, which she published with the small publishing house Carabba in 1935, as a novel as well as a film treatment. The book would become a film, directed by Mario Bonnard in 1939 (Carroli 1993, 136, emphasis mine). When a film was distributed in an English-speaking country and was assigned a title in the English language, I include both titles. Otherwise, I only cite the Italian one. 8 Reich’s translation. She does not reference the source of this quotation (2000, 137).

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image completely out of character with the woman who once wrote that one must live for an ideal and be willing to pay for one’s ideas. I would like to provide a different interpretation. De Céspedes’ involvement in screenwriting was two-fold: she decided to write the script of Nessuno torna indietro to save the film, which otherwise would not have been made at all. Furthermore, and beyond the demands of this first project, de Céspedes’ screenwriting endeavors represented a common tendency among writers of her generation Alberto Moravia and Mario Soldati, for example, were writers and screenwriters who shared de Céspedes’ ideological opposition to the regime, strategically disguising their ideological opposition to the regime by criticizing only the mundane aspects of life under fascism in their works. Blasetti embraced fascism from the beginning, in 1921-1922 (Prono 1982, 221), and entered the film world as a critic for the fascist publication, L’Impero in 1925. His first film, Sole, made with the tacit support of the Minister of Popular Culture Giuseppe Bottai (Garofalo 2002, 235) in 1929, celebrates one of the government’s most ambitious projects, and one which Stanislao Pugliese describes as “a major propaganda coup for the regime” (2001, 15): the draining of the Pontine swamps outside Rome, following land reclamation policies (Celli and Cottino-Jones 2007, 29). Upon the film’s release, Mussolini declared that it represented “the dawn of the fascist film” (Liehm 1984, 25). In his book, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy: The Passing of the Rex, James Hay identifies a connection in Sole between the development of the land into new, fertile soil and the rebirth of the film industry (1987, 135). Moreover, Sole illustrates the principles of ruralism embraced by fascist ideology—a recurring theme in Blasetti’s subsequent work. Gian Piero Brunetta notes that Blasetti’s films are aligned with the politics of the regime (1993, 125). Thus, Blasetti became a practitioner of the cinema-of-consensus, which defined the Italian production during the first half of the 1930s. Terra Madre, from 1931, explores the tension between rural and urban spaces, favoring the former. Piero Garofalo observes that such a contrast “reflected that aspect of Fascism that had incorporated into its rhetoric the ideological refutation of chaotic modern life in favor of simple and noble country living” (2002, 236). 1860, made in 1934, re-interpreted the history of the Risorgimento as a precursor to fascism. Carlo Celli and Marga Cottino-Jones describe Blasetti’s historical spectacle as “trumpeting the heroic and nationalistic values dear to Fascist culture ministers [...] [with] a strong [...] connection between the audacity of the Fascists and Garibaldi’s volunteers, and Mussolini and Garibaldi as men of providence whose charisma could unify the diverse forces behind a common cause”

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(2007, 28—29). Vecchia guardia [Old Guard], from 1934, celebrates the twelfth anniversary of the March on Rome. Brunetta remarks that while this film represents Blasetti’s strongest commitment to fascist ideology, it is also obsolete. While Vecchia guardia provides a nostalgic backward look at the fascist revolution, the regime’s current politics looked forward towards military expansion and colonial conquests (1993, 135—136). The film did not meet the censors’ approval and was held from distribution until the film critic, Corrado Pavolini, brother to the Minister of Popular Culture, Alessandro Pavolini, intervened on behalf of Vecchia guardia (Prono 1982, 221—222). Over the next two years, however, Blasetti encountered significant difficulties with censorship. The cinema-of-consensus that defined the first half of the 1930s would evolve into the cinema-of-propaganda during the second half of the decade, following the war against Ethiopia in 1935-1936. Blasetti’s ideas about a cinema that would collaborate with the regime were no longer useful because of the way in which the regime itself now planned to represent the spectacle of its imperial grandeur onscreen, as well as Italy’s participation in World War II: “Italy’s colonial films were intended to appeal to audiences’ needs for hyperbolic representations” (Hay 1987, 185).9 Moreover, because the military invasion of Ethiopia proved that Mussolini’s policies were becoming increasingly belligerent, Blasetti began to re-assess his political convictions and became decidedly pacifist. When Mussolini declared, shortly after Hitler’s army invaded Poland in 1939, that Italy would remain neutral, Blasetti enthusiastically started working on an anti-war film, La corona di ferro [The Iron Crown]. However, when Mussolini reversed his earlier position and joined the war effort in 1940, Blasetti withdrew his membership from the fascist party (Prono 1982, 225—226). Many years later, Blasetti explained that he had accepted Nessuno torna indietro, rather hastily, in 1942, to avoid making another film, I quattro di Bir el Gobi, about the first Italian campaign against the British in Libya, in 1940. He refused to work on a project that glorified a war in which he did not believe. Blasetti decided to work on de Céspedes’ novel precisely because the regime had ostracized it (Aprà 9

The task to put into practice Mussolini’s famous motto “Il cinema è l’arma più forte” [film is the strongest weapon] would be given to filmmakers such as Mario Camerini (Il grande appello [The Last Roll-Call], 1936), Romolo Marcellini (Sentinelle di bronzo [Sentinels of Bronze], 1937), Carmine Gallone (Scipione l’africano [The Defeat of Hannibal], 1937), Augusto Genina (Lo Squadrone bianco [White Squadron], 1936, Bengasi, 1942), and Goffredo Alessandrini (Luciano Serra pilota [Luciano Serra, Pilot], 1938, Abuna Messias [Cardinal Messias], 1939, Giarabub, 1942).

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1982, 66). It is important to note that Blasetti’s early political choices did not prevent him from working with colleagues who did not share his beliefs— he unequivocally affirmed that intolerance was inhumanly stupid (Prono 1982, 334). His daughter, Mara, stated that he was surrounded by the best minds of his generation, both inside and outside fascism (Ceronetti 2007, n.p.). Brunetta echoes this sentiment by praising Blasetti’s curiosity, his natural instinct to discover and validate talent, as well as his ability to break down ideological barriers (1993, 126). Blasetti worked with a number of antifascist screenwriters. For example, for his first film, Sole, he sought the collaboration of Aldo Vergano, a journalist who had left the profession when Mussolini came to power and who had no prior screenwriting experience. As I mentioned earlier, Blasetti also worked with Soldati on his screenwriting debut in La tavola dei poveri, in 1932. In 1942, he co-wrote 4 passi fra le nuvole [Four Steps in the Clouds] with Cesare Zavattini and Aldo de Benedetti who, like Moravia, was writing uncredited screenplays after 1938, because he was Jewish. Alba de Céspedes’ presence among this group of screenwriters would, therefore, not be out of place.

Si Gira/Shoot! When initial plans were made to adapt Nessuno torna indietro to the screen, Amleto Palermi was selected to direct the film, but he died in April 1941 (Reich 2000, 138). De Céspedes proposed to re-write the script herself in November 1941, and Blasetti became interested in the film in October 1942 (Reich 2000, 138). The shooting of Nessuno torna indietro began that same year with the working title of Istituto Grimaldi at the Scalera Film studio in Rome. The film featured an all-star cast:10 Elisa Cegani, who made her acting debut in Blasetti’s film, Aldebaran, in 1935, and who would embark on an extensive collaboration with the director; Valentina Cortese, in her second acting appearance with Blasetti; Maria Denis, the “Mary Pickford of Italy,” who was very popular with the regime;11 the already mentioned, Doris Duranti;12 Mariella Lotti, Maria 10 One of the eight characters in Nessuno torna indietro did not make the transition from page to screen. It is very telling that the woman is left behind is de Céspedes intellectual alter ego, Augusta. Reich remarks that Augusta exhibits the greatest defiance of appropriate female conduct of all the characters and reports on de Céspedes’ dismay at her exclusion from the film (2000, 143). 11 At the end of the war, Denis was arrested for collaborating with the occupying German army and was eventually acquitted.

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Mercader, and Dina Sassoli. The film was produced by Artisti Associati and Quartafilm13 and distributed by Artisti Associati. In his book, Alessandro Blasetti, Gianfranco Gori comments on the choice of the cast: showcasing the most prominent female performers of the time imbued the film with the awareness that an epoch was ending, a final pageant celebrating a bygone era (1983, 78). According to a film review of 1945, a feeling of obsolescence also defined the atmosphere and the characters of Nessuno torna indietro: “Quella Pensione Grimaldi non è tanto vecchia ... Eppure sembra appartenere a un mondo già lontano nel tempo e le sue pensionanti, che dovrebbero essere tipi di tutti i tempi, compaiono già come figure di un album” [The Pensione Grimaldi is not very old, yet it belongs to the distant past and its residents, who should be timeless characters, instead look like images in a photo album] (Trabucco 1945, n.p.). Indeed, the end was near. The war, in which Blasetti did not believe, had had devastating effects on the production of the film’s. Blasetti’s brother was killed at the front, in April 1943, an event that he described as the most tragic occurrence in his life (Savio 1979, 152). In July, the Allies bombed Rome for the first time, since the beginning of the war, bringing anxiety to the set (Savio 1979, 152). In an interview with Blasetti in 1974, Francesco Savio called Nessuno torna indietro, “The last film before July 25th July, 3rd July, 23rd September, 13th October (1979, 152). On that day, the Gran Consiglio del Fascismo (Grand Council of Fascism) voted to remove Mussolini from office. King Vittorio Emanuele III had Mussolini arrested, and appointed Marshall Pietro Badoglio as head of the Italian government. On September 3rd Italy surrendered to the Commander-inChief of the Allied Forces, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. On September 23rd the Repubblica Sociale Italiana [Italian Social Republic] was founded, a puppet state that incorporated the north and the centre of Italy, including Rome, and controlled by the occupying German army with Mussolini appointed as head-of-state.14 In the south, the legitimate Italian 12 At the end of the war, Duranti fled to the Dominican Republic because of her involvement with Pavolini and never returned to Italy. 13 The production company, Montedoro, owned by the editor, Mondadori, that was initially going to finance the film in 1941, apparently abandoned the project. Bonsaver cites Enrico Decleva’s biography of Mondadori, where Decleva maintains that the filming was interrupted in June 1943 because the production company went bankrupt (2007, 371). 14 Pavolini, who had been instrumental in negotiating with the regime on de Céspedes’ behalf, occupied a prominent position in the Italian Social Republic. He was the leader of the reformed Partito Nazionale Fascista [National Fascist Party]

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government reigned with King Vittorio Emanuele III, Marshall Badoglio and the occupying Allied army. On October 13th the Italian government declared war on Germany. Thus, the country was fragmented by a civil war, the northbound Allied advance made Rome vulnerable, and the filming of Nessuno torna indietro was brought to a halt. Cinecittà, the film studios located in Rome, was relocated to Venice and “renamed” Cinevillaggio (“cine-village” instead of “cine-city”) (Brunetta 1993, 355—356). Blasetti was chosen to participate in the project that would rebuild the industry, however he refused to follow the fascists and relocate in the north. Instead he hid in the Basilica di Sant’Agnese for two months (Blasetti 2002, 35), disguised as a priest by the name of Padre Lulani, adopting his mother’s maiden name, and wrote poetry that he would publish two years later.15 Not much is known about when Nessuno torna indietro was finally completed and disagreement surrounds its release.16 According to ANICA, Associazione nazionale industrie cinematografiche audiovisive [Association of Cinematographic Audiovisual Industries], the film was issued a censorship visa on 15th November 1944 and was first shown to the that bore the new name, Partito Fascista Repubblicano [Republican Fascist Party] between 1943-1945. Pavolini would be shot by the Partisans on 28th April 1945. 15 Blasetti said in an interview, in 1966, that he wrote poetry during the period chronicled in Roma città aperta [Open City] (1945), directed by Roberto Rossellini, a time when his work schedule was free because there was no work (Prono 1982, 336). The period to which Blasetti referred is the spring of 1944, the last days of the German occupation, before the US army entered the city on 4th June 1944. Later that year, he wrote the treatment for a film that was never produced, Mercato Nero, and published an essay about acting. In 1945, he wrote the screenplay for a film that he would not make, Paolo e Francesca [Paolo and Francesca], and directed two plays (Gori 1983, 79). 16 Reich claims that the film was “apparently” completed in the fall of 1943 and was not distributed nationwide until late 1945 and early 1946 (2000, 132, 146). Laura di Nicola contends that the film was blocked by the censors in 1943, and would not be released until 1945 (Zancan 2001, 112), however, she does not explain whether the censors stopped the filming or banned the finished product. Luca Verdone asserts that the film was edited during a period of transition and was re-released on February 1946 (1989, 51). Nevertheless, he does not assign a time frame to that period of transition, nor does he provide the date of the film’s first release. Bonsaver states that the film was “probably” completed in the summer of 1943 and that “it seems” that it was never released (2007, 257). Laura Fortini indicates that the film was shot in 1943 but it was not distributed because of the war (Asor Rosa 1992, 165). Aprà seems to be the only writer who confirms ANICA’s release date for Nessuno torna indietro, March 1945 in Rome (1982, 67).

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public on 5th January 1945. Its initial commercial distribution took place in March 1945 in a Roma libera [free Rome] and only after the liberation of Milan, which also marked the end of the war, on 25th April 1945, was Nessuno torna indietro released in northern Italy.

From Novel to Film In discussing the relationship between literature and cinema, Julie Sanders makes a distinction between adaptation and appropriation. “An adaptation signals a relationship with an original [...], [while] appropriation frequently affects a more decisive journey away from the informing source into a wholly new cultural product and domain” (2006, 26). In discussing the relationship between the literary and filmic versions of Nessuno torna indietro, Reich refers to transformations and deformations. “The reasons behind these narrative alterations have as much to do with cinematic conventions as they do with both implicit and explicit Fascist codes of proper feminine conduct” (2000, 142). Reich’s reading points to the film as an act of appropriation of the novel, insofar as de Céspedes’ writing beyond fascism is repositioned by Blasetti within the confines of fascist patriarchy. The evidence of Blasetti’s ideological evolution and renouncing of fascism, over the years, contradicts the political validity of this statement. Rather, I would like to pursue the two other issues, mentioned by Reich, that I believe cause inevitable changes when the discordant voices of de Céspedes and Blasetti migrate from words to images: cinematic conventions and proper feminine conduct. Blasetti’s filmography demonstrates an approach that employed a variety of styles and Nessuno torna indietro is no exception. After directing historical spectacles, fantasy films, celebrations of political landmarks, and anti-war films, Blasetti made a film that combined two popular genres from the 1940s: the White Telephones film and the Schoolgirl Comedy. White Telephones films were an extension of a successful genre from the 1930s, the Comedy of Characters, which modeled itself on the American Romantic Comedies of George Cukor and Howard Hawks. White Telephones films portray a conflict-free world, where all dreams come true, an escapist fantasy unconcerned with the everyday realities of a country at war. From a technical point of view, this genre relies on the kind of expensive studio productions perfected by Hollywood and uses the most well known stars of Italian cinema.17 17

L'Amante Segreta [The Secret Lover] directed by Carmine Gallone in 1941, Dopo Divorzieremo, directed by Nunzio Malasomma in 1940, and Il Fidanzato di

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Schoolgirl Comedy films depict school as a place of social conflicts, where young women attempt to resist the repressive education of a society anchored in 19th century moral standards.18

Geographies The Istituto Grimaldi, where the girls reside while attending university in Rome, delineates a space that has both geographical and mental/psychological connotations in Nessuno torna indietro. In her essay, “La sponda dell’attesa: Journeys and Rites of Passage in Nessuno torna indietro,” Sandra Carletti comments on the novel’s recurring metaphor of the bridge, which describes the boarding-house as a temporary present that facilitates the journey between past and future. “The point of departure [is] a condition of emotional and economic dependence from the family, and the arrival is the realization of one’s aspirations” (1998, 174). The movement within these three spaces seems to be strictly controlled: “a one-way movement that does not allow the retracing of one’s steps” (Carletti 1998, 175). The girls left home and went to Rome to pursue their studies, there, at the Istituto Grimaldi, they become adults, and once they leave they will be women. Non tutte saremo qui l’anno prossimo. Ecco: è come se noi fossimo al passaggio di un ponte. Si costruiscono forse case sul ponte? Siamo già partite da una sponda e non siamo ancora giunte all’altra. Quello che abbiamo lasciato è dietro le nostre spalle, neppure ci voltiamo per guardarlo, quello che ci attende è una sponda dietro la nebbia. Neppure noi sappiamo cosa scopriremo quando la nebbia si scioglierà (de Céspedes 1941, 125). We shall not all be here next year. You see, it is as if we were crossing a bridge. Does one build a house on a bridge? We have already started out from the one shore, and not yet arrived at the other. The one we have left is behind our backs, we do not even turn round to look at it. The one that

Mia Moglie, directed by Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia in 1943 are significant examples of this genre. 18 See Reich 1995. Maddalena zero in condotta [Maddalena Zero for Conduct], directed in 1940 and Teresa Venerdì [Doctor Beware], directed in 1941 by Vittorio De Sica, and Ore 9 lezione di chimica [Schoolgirl Diary], directed by Mario Mattoli in 1941 are representative films of this genre.

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I would like to put forward the idea that de Céspedes’ voice speaks against this statement, made by one of the characters in the novel, De Céspedes presents the Istituto Grimaldi as a place where one can build a house, whereas Blasetti embraces the notion that the boardinghouse merely functions as a conduit between the “before” and “after” in the lives of these young women. A number of literary characters, who challenge the idea that the Istituto Grimaldi is a transitory space, find themselves transformed into screen characters who need to satisfy two requirements: the narrative closure that 1940s mainstream cinema demanded and a female representation that conformed to the roles assigned to women by patriarchal ideology. The Istituto Grimaldi, a female-gendered place that Robin PickeringIazzi describes as “a city within a city—a women’s city in Rome” in her essay, “The Sexual Politics of the Migrational City in Nessuno torna indietro” (2000, 90), is a secluded territory seemingly unaffected by what happens outside its walls. According to de Grazia, this microcosm becomes a prison: “a halfway house with fixed hours [and] closely watched group routines” (1993, 233). In the novel, references to imprisonment abound from the very beginning: “Sulla grande casa grigia il portone s’apriva come una gola oscura; una vetrata che divideva l’androne fermava l’ultima luce del crepuscolo e, oltre questa, si vedevano passare, per attimi, imprecise forme nere” (de Céspedes 1941, 11) [The main entrance to the big, grey house opened a cavernous mouth to the street; the last glimmer of the dusk was caught by the glass door of the vestibule, behind which vague, dark shapes could be seen passing to and fro] (Noble n.d.). Inside this ominous place, one can hear the sounds of lamenting 19

All quotations from Nessuno torna indietro are from the 20th printing, published on 5th January 1941, and from the English language translation of the book, Jan Nobles’s text There’s No Turning Back. Pickering-Iazzi indicates 1941 as the year this translation was published (2000, 108), but there is no such date, or any other, in the book itself. For the purposes of this essay, I chose an edition of the novel published around the time of the filming, before de Céspedes’ significant revisions of 1964 (which were first published in 1966). Noble’s translation is the only one currently available. Sandra Carletti translated the novel as her dissertation project in 1996, but her translation pertains to a later edition of the novel. Furthermore her text has not been published at the time of this writing. There's No Turning Back: A Translation of Nessuno torna indietro Based on the Revised Edition of Alba de Céspedes’ Novel, With a Critical Introduction and an Updated Bibliography, diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1996.

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voices: “Mi sento chiusa, imprigionata.” “Non vi sentite tutte prigoniere? Si soffoca qua dentro, si soffoca tra queste vecchie zitelle consacrate nel loro egoismo!” (de Céspedes 1941, 24) [Don’t you all feel prisoners? It is suffocating in here, among these old maids so confirmed in their selfishness!] (Noble n.d., 19). Yet, de Céspedes adopts a strategy whereby she speaks against the voice of her characters. Despite the sense of entrapment conveyed in this declaration, a second feeling emerges from such isolation: a measure of safety and protection from the world beyond that door. Beyond, a fictitious freedom exists, where the realization of these women’s aspirations, invoked by Carletti, translates into disappointment.

Xenia: From ingénue to gold digger The geographical and emotional transition from adolescence to adulthood is achieved, in terms of cinematic genres, by the passage from a Schoolgirl Comedy setting to the White Telephones backdrop, which is embodied in the character of Xenia (performed by Mariella Lotti). After failing the defense of her thesis, Xenia steals a ring from a classmate, and runs away from the Istituto Grimaldi. She boards a train for Milan to start a new life. Pickering-Iazzi registers the complaint Xenia had voiced to her housemates, regarding the sheltered existence she has led at the Istituto Grimaldi and her desire to venture into the world: “Certe notti mi prende come una smania, la smania di far presto a finire per uscire di qui: e non chiudo occhio e mi tormento pensando che mentre io sto ingabbiata in questa clausura di monache, fuori la vita scorre, forse buone occasioni si presentano [...] e passano, e io non ci sono” (de Céspedes 1941, 12) [Some nights I am in a perfect frenzy to finish soon, and to get away from here. I don’t close an eye, tormenting myself with the thought that while I am caged in this nunnery, life is passing outside. Splendid chances (...) may be presenting themselves, and I can do nothing about it] (Noble n.d., 9— 10). The familiar image of confinement inside the boardinghouse and its spatial opposite, life passing outside, create a binary opposition between two distinct places: the Istituto Grimaldi, and what exists beyond it. This model challenges the ternary home-boardinghouse-world reading I mentioned earlier, insofar as it confers permanence and stability on the Istituto Grimaldi, —a building that stands on its own, not as a bridge between past and future, nor “a place almost suspended in time and space” (Carletti 1998, 174). Xenia’s girlish musings about the fabulous chances she might be missing come to an abrupt end, when she falls short of earning her degree.

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Consequently, her life as a student, at the Istituto Grimaldi, becomes meaningless. Nor can she find refuge at her family’s home. There’s no turning back. Xenia is propelled into womanhood overnight. Her words express genuine remorse for having disappointed her parents’ expectations, a sentiment that contradicts Carletti’s assertion that once these young women leave home, they become emotionally distant from their family (1998, 174). Xenia scoteva la testa:—Non è possible, non hanno soldi, neanche un soldo. Per farmi studiare papà ha fatto l’ipoteca sulla vigna. [...] S’arrestò perchè i singhiozzi la soffocavano. Riprese accorata:—Non posso rimanere neppure un giorno, è impossibile, è giusto: i miei hanno mangiato patate tutto l’anno per tenermi qui. La colpa è mia, capite? —e si batteva la fronte con la mano aperta: —Mia, mia ... (de Céspedes 1941, 33). Xenia shook her head: ‘Out of the question,’ she said, ‘they haven’t the money, not a penny. My father had to mortgage the vineyard to enable me to study.’ [...] She stopped, choked with sobs, then went on again in bitter tones: ‘I cannot remain another day, and it is only right that it should be so, for my people have lived on potatoes the whole year to keep me here. The fault is mine, you see!’ and she struck her forehead with her open hand: ‘Mine, mine ...’ (Noble n.d., 26).

Accepting the responsibility for her academic failure is an indication that Xenia is now an adult, and therefore her time at the Istituto Grimaldi has expired. An immediate inside-outside dichotomy is established: those who stay behind quickly disassociate from the person who belongs elsewhere and therefore becomes a stranger, as if she were dead. “È andata a vedere che cosa c’è. È come quelli che muoiono. —Ma quelli non ritornano. — Neppure Xenia, ritornerà a dirci che cosa c’è di là” (de Céspedes 1941, 62) [She went to see the world for herself. She was like those who die.’ ‘But they do not return.’ ‘Nor will Xenia return to tell us what she has found out there’] (Noble n.d., 28). Di là [there], versus here—two distinct and opposite spaces. Xenia’s physical presence at the Istituto Grimaldi is obliterated when the nun crosses her name off the register. This gesture is accompanied by the only discernible date recorded in the novel, 2nd December 1934, an honor apparently not apparently merited by the events that situate the narrative within its historical setting.20 Xenia, too, feels 20

Two historical occurrences and a single reference to the fascist regime are mentioned in the novel, but only insofar as they affect the lives of the characters: the Ethiopian war (1935-1936), the breaking out of the Spanish civil war (1936),

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distanced from the people who defined her world just the day before: “Ma già il Grimaldi le appariva come uno di quei paesaggi visti in sogno: cercava di rivedere i volti delle compagne, ma non li ritrovava, si dileguavano” (de Céspedes 1941, 66—67) [The Pension Grimaldi seemed to her already like part of a dream. She made an effort to recall the faces of her companions, but was unable to do so] (Noble n.d., 52). “You’re an extraordinary woman, one like no other.” This line of dialogue from the film21 spoken to Xenia by the Commendatore, an elderly suitor, appropriately describes what Xenia has become, now that she resides on the other side. The film purposefully avoids mentioning the period of financial difficulties Xenia encounters in the novel when she first arrives in Milan, conforming to the regime’s practice of not showing “literary or cinematic references to economic troubles” as Reich aptly notes (2000, 150). Such an exclusion exemplifies the strategy of appropriation described by Sanders, insofar as Blasetti’s mise-en-scène transforms de Céspedes’ depiction into a “wholly new cultural product and domain” (2006, 26). If this decision appears to validate the film’s concession to a fascist aesthetic, the omission of Xenia’s initial struggle in Milan also removes a direct reference to a fascist institution contained in de Céspedes’ text.22 During a job interview with a bank, the first question Xenia is asked is whether she is a Party member. She replies that she is a member of the GUF (de Céspedes 1941, 70). Whereas de Céspedes unequivocally critiques fascism by exposing the hypocrisy of a system in which employers make hiring decisions based on party affiliations rather than merit, Blasetti instead chooses a neutral position. Eventually, Xenia finds employment as a secretary. She quickly befriends a powerful male colleague who buys her flowers, treats her to expensive weekends, and sets her up with an apartment in exchange for sexual favors. Reich remarks, “she’s seduced by the urban elite’s wealthy lifestyle into semi-prostitution” (2000, 141). With a Marlene Dietrich-like icy demeanor, Xenia uses men as stepping stones to get to the top. However, what awaits her there is an existence as a kept woman: “Nella and the Gruppi Universitari Fascisti (the fascist university youth association) established in 1920. In the film, only the reference to the Spanish civil war remains. 21 In the novel, the corresponding dialogue reads: “Voi siete una donna non comune, Xenia; nessun’altra vi somiglia” (de Céspedes 1941, 334) [You are a most unusual woman, Xenia; there is no other quite like you] (Noble n.d., 260). Elsewhere in the novel, Xenia is similarly described as “Una donna numero uno” (de Céspedes 1941, 297) [A first class woman] (Noble n.d., 231). 22 Inexplicably, Noble’s translation of the novel omits this reference.

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giornata oziava; si trascinava da un divano all’altro, con le sigarette, un certo suo cuscino preferito” (de Céspedes 1941, 299) [She lazed through her days, dragging herself from one divan to the other with a favorite cushion, her cigarettes] (Noble n.d., 233). In the film, a girlfriend comes to visit her and upon entering the house exclaims: “How beautiful, a white telephone!” Xenia is officially a diva, the filmic counterpart of the literary character who can deliver a line such as this one: “Certi princípi esistono solo fino a quando si comprende che si vive lo stesso facendone a meno” (de Céspedes 1941, 308) [Certain principles exist only until you find out that it is possible to live just as well without them] (Noble n.d., 240). The development of Xenia’s character differs significantly from novel to film. In de Céspedes’ text, Xenia’s ascent is unstoppable: she collects men and the objects they purchase for her, and then drops the men. At one point, Xenia looks back, as she had done once before, inside the Istituto Grimaldi, when she was still an ingénue, back to when she realized the disillusionment her lack of academic success had caused her family, and for which she has accepted full responsibility. Instead, she has now decided that the past does not merit her consideration and therefore she is not accountable for her present actions. The contrition she had shown on the eve of her departure from the Istituto Grimaldi, has turned into the cynicism she now displays. Tutto il resto della sua vita di collegio le appariva ingenuo: ore sprecate dietro inutili illusioni. […] Xenia non sentiva in sé molta riconoscenza per Dino, per il denaro che spendeva. [...] La colpa, pensava scagionandosi, non era sua. Perciò accettava facilmente il denaro, quasi dovuto le sembrava, come un indennizzo per quello che avrebbe potuto guadagnare e al quale rinunciava per causa di lui, di Dino (de Céspedes 1941, 299). All the rest of her life in the hostel seemed childish: hours wasted in useless illusions. […] Xenia did not feel any particular gratitude towards Dino for the money she spent. [...] The fault, she thought, excusing herself, was not hers, and so she went on accepting money without question – almost as her due, in fact—as compensation for what she might have been earning, were it not for Dino (Noble n.d., 233).

The endings of the two texts provide the most striking examples of the filmic trans-literation of Nessuno torna indietro. Xenia exits the novel in the grand fashion of a diva leaving the operatic stage: driving away from an impossible love affair, abandoning a heartbroken young man, knowing that the only one she has ever loved is herself, deliberately returning to her life as a mantenuta, a kept woman, defying the boundaries of feminine decorum. “Accese il motore, tolse in freno, ingranò la marcia, spinse

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l’acceleratore” (De Céspedes 1941, 387) [Then she started] (Noble n.d., 300).23 On the other hand, the cinematic Xenia experiences a moral conversion: she realizes that becoming the lover of her former benefactor’s rival, who is imprisoned, is not a respectable life-style. The emotions that she has kept in check, since leaving the Istituto Grimaldi, are finally released. The film ends with the reassuringly repentant image of an unrecognizable, teary-eyed Xenia, who visits Dino in prison and devotedly vows to await his discharge. The film proves that Xenia’s heartless and calculating behavior was a temporary aberration and ultimately the traditional virtues of womanhood prevail.

Works Cited Argentieri, Mino. 1998. Il cinema in guerra: arte, comunicazione e propaganda in Italia, 1940-1944. Rome: Editori Riuniti. Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. 2001. Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Blasetti, Alessandro. 2002. Il mestiere del cinema. Rome: Gangemi. —. 1982. Scritti sul cinema. Ed. Adriano Aprà. Venice: Marsilio. —. 1950. Cinema italiano, ieri. In Cinema italiano oggi, ed. Alessandro Blasetti and Gian Luigi Rondi, 17–48. Rome: Bestetti. Bonsaver, Guido. 2007. Censorship and Literature in Fascist Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bragaglia, Cristina. 1993. Il piacere del racconto: narrativa italiana e cinema, 1895–1990. Florence: Nuova Italia. Brunetta, Gian Piero. 1979. Cinema italiano tra le due guerre: fascismo e politica cinematografica. Milan: Mursia. —. 1993. Storia del cinema italiano: il cinema del regime, 1929–1945. Rome: Editori Riuniti. Carletti, Sandra. 2000. Internalizing the Gaze: Surveillance, Sin, and Morality in “Nessuno torna indietro.” In Writing Beyond Fascism: Cultural Resistance in the Life and Works of Alba De Céspedes, ed. Carol Gallucci and Ellen Nerenberg, 110–131. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. —. 1998. La sponda dell’attesa: Journeys and Rites of Passage in “Nessuno torna indietro.” Italian Culture 16, 2: 173–190. Carroli, Piera. 1993. Esperienza e narrazione nella scrittura di Alba de Céspedes. Ravenna: Longo. 23

The English translation ignores this very cinematic passage describing the details of Xenia’s gestures as she leaves in her car.

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De Céspedes, Alba. 1966. Nessuno torna indietro. Milan: Mondadori. —. N. d. There’s No Turning Back. Trans. Jan Noble. London: Jarrolds. —. 1941. Nessuno torna indietro. Verona: Mondadori. De Grazia, Victoria. 1992. How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Di Nicola, Laura. 2001. Per una biografia di Alba de Céspedes. In Alba de Céspedes. Ed. Marina Zancan, 111–114. Milan: Mondadori. Fallaci, Neera. 1982. Ci rubarono cinque anni. Interview with Alessandro Blasetti. In Alessandro Blasetti: il cinema che ho vissuto. Ed. Franco Prono. Bari: Dedalo. Ferme, Valerio. 2006. Against Marriage and Child-Rearing: Alba de Céspedes’ “Nessuno torna indietro” vis-à-vis the Social Framework of Mussolini’s Pro-Natal, Pro-Marriage Campaigns of the “Ventennio.” Italian Quarterly 43: 45–58; 167–168. Fortini, Laura. 1992. “Nessuno torna indietro” di Alba de Céspedes. In Letteratura italiana. Le opere. Vol. 4. Ed. Alberto Asor Rosa, 137— 166. Turin: Einaudi. Garnett, Tay. 1996. Directing: Learn From the Masters. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Gallucci, Carol. 1995. Alba de Céspedes’ s “There’s No Turning Back”: Challenging the New Woman’s Future. In Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, Culture. Ed. Robin Pickering-Iazzi, 200— 219. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gori, Gianfranco. 1984. Alessandro Blasetti. Florence: La Nuova Italia. Hay, James. 1987. Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy: The Passing of the Rex. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Masi, Stefano. 2001. A. Blasetti: 1900-2000. Rome: Comitato Alessandro Blasetti. Merry, Bruce. 1990. Women in Modern Italian Literature: Four Studies Based on the Work of Grazia Deledda, Alba de Céspedes, Natalia Ginzburg, and Dacia Maraini. Townsville: James Cook University of North Queensland. Nerenbergen, Ellen. 1991. “Donna proprio … proprio donna:” The Social Construction of Femininity in “Nessuno torna indietro”. Romance Languages Annual 3: 267—273. Petrignani. Sandra. 1996. Le signore della scrittura: interviste. Milan: La Tartaruga. 37—48. Pickering-Iazzi, Robin. 2000. The Sexual Politics of the Migrational City in “Nessuno torna indietro.” In Writing Beyond Fascism: Cultural Resistance in the Life and Work of Alba De Céspedes, ed. Carol Gallucci and Ellen Nerenberg, 85—109. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh

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Dickinson University Press. Pugliese, Stanislao. 2001. Italian Fascism and Antifascism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Reich, Jacqueline. 2000. Fear of Filming: Alba de Céspedes and the 1943 Film Adaptation of “Nessuno torna indietro.” In Writing Beyond Fascism: Cultural Resistance in the Life and Works of Alba De Céspedes, ed. Carol Gallucci and Ellen Nerenberg, 132—152. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. —. 1995. Reading, Writing, and Rebellion: Collectivity, Specularity, and Sexuality in the Italian Schoolgirl Comedy, 1934-1943. In Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, Culture. Ed. Robin Pickering-Iazzi, 120—251. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sanders, Julie. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation. New York: Routledge. Savio, Francesco. 1979. Cinecittà anni trenta: parlano 116 protagonisti del secondo cinema italiano (1930-1943). Vol. 1. Rome: Bulzoni. Trabucco, Carlo. 1945. “Nessuno torna indietro.” Il Popolo, March 4. Verdone, Luca. 1989. I film di Alessandro Blasetti. Rome: Gremese. Verdone, Mario. 2006. Alessandro Blasetti. Rome: Edilazio. Vitti-Alexander, Maria Rosaria. 1991. Il passaggio del ponte: l’evoluzione del personaggio femminile di Alba de Céspedes. Campi immaginabili 3: 103—112.

UNTYING THE TANGLE: PIETRO GERMI AND THAT AWFUL MESS ON VIA MERULANA STEFANIA BENINI, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

Un maledetto imbroglio è un film poliziesco, a me piacciono tanto i film polizieschi, mi divertono tanto, appena ce n’è uno lo vado a vedere, persino quelli brutti. Era un mio vecchio sogno quello di fare un film poliziesco, non si è mai riusciti a farli: forse l’importanza del film è nel fatto che è il primo poliziesco italiano, cioè una cosa nuova, una maniera di vedere una realtà che non è mai stata rappresentata, quella della polizia e del suo lavoro, nei confronti di una società dove accadono certi fatti. Ci siamo sforzati di risolvere ad esempio questo problema; può sembrare un piccolo problema, forse lo è, non lo so. Certo dovrebbe essere un film divertente, dovrebbe essere un film divertente che comunque dovrebbe essere sempre anche un film mio; cioè nella rappresentazione dei personaggi, delle cose, alla fine, dovrebbe venir fuori, più o meno, un certo senso della realtà e della vita che in qualche modo si dovrebbe collegare agli altri film miei (Gambetti 1960, quoted in Caldiron 2004, 41—42). Facts of a Murder (Un maledetto imbroglio) is a detective film. I like detective films very much, they amuse me a lot, as soon as one comes out, I go see it, even the bad ones. Making a detective film was an old dream of mine. No one has never succeeded at making them: maybe this film’s importance lies in the fact that it is the first Italian detective film, that is to say a new thing, a way of seeing a reality that has never been represented, one of the police and their work, in comparison with a society where certain events happen. For instance, we made an effort to solve this problem; it may seem like a small problem, maybe it is small, I don’t know. For sure it should be an amusing film that will also be a film of mine; that is to say that in the representation of characters, of things, at the end, more or less, a certain sense of reality and life should come out, which should somehow connect to my other films.

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This declaration by director Pietro Germi encompasses a series of corollaries, which are important to understand the value the filmmaker ascribes to his film, Facts of a Murder, 1959. For instance, it is interesting to note how, in presenting the film, Germi makes no reference to Carlo Emilio Gadda’s novel, That Awful Mess on Via Merulana (Quer Pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana, 1957), which inspired the film. The coordinates, underlined by Germi in his definition of the film, are all related to cinematic discourse, with references to the detective film genre, and with the strong assertion of the archetypal value of the film— considered to be “the first Italian detective film,” with allusions to the social context as well as to contaminations from the comedy genre (“for sure it should be an amusing movie”) and finally with the affirmation of a thematic and interpretive continuity with Germi’s previous films (“a certain sense of reality and life”). Germi claims the “paternity” of the work entirely, even on other occasions, always eliding the Gaddian subtext: I film più importanti e migliori credo siano quelli che nascono da una emozione. Ma forse dico una cosa ovvia, forse Benedetto Croce non diceva la stessa cosa? Vedi Un maledetto imbroglio: un film di fattura piuttosto che di sentimento, che io ho costruito un po’ dall’esterno: è stato un lavoro piacevolissimo, mi sono molto divertito a scriverlo, a manipolare l’intrigo, a far combaciare i pezzi e a far scattare il meccanismo. Del resto sono un appassionato lettore di libri polizieschi e da molto tempo pensavo di girare un poliziesco italiano. Mi muoveva anche una specie di scommessa. Quante volte si era lamentata l’inesistenza del romanzo e del film poliziesco in Italia, e se n’era dedotta non so quale nostra incapacità a farli? Io ho voluto provare. Ma la mia partecipazione è stata più meccanica che emozionale (Moscon 1961, quoted in Caldiron 2004, 46—47). I believe that the most important and best movies are those that arise from an emotion. However, maybe I am stating the obvious; didn’t Benedetto Croce state the same thing? See Facts of a Murder: a film of workmanship rather than of feelings, which I built a bit from the outside. It has been a very pleasant job; I really had fun writing it, manipulating its plot, making the pieces coincide and the mechanism go off. Moreover, I am an impassioned reader of detective stories and I had been thinking of shooting an Italian detective film for a long time. A sort of bet also prompted me. How many times had they lamented the inexistence of the detective novel and film in Italy, and deduced some inability of ours in making them? I wanted to give it a try. However, my participation has been more mechanical than emotional.

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Once again, Germi claims total responsibility for the work, starting from its preparation in the writing stage, by underlining the essential component of his adaptation: “I really had fun writing it, manipulating its plot, making the pieces coincide and the mechanism go off.” Germi makes use of the Pasticciaccio, then, as an authentic “pretext” to put the plot and the precision mechanism of the detective story into action. A subliminal trace of Gadda’s “text” in Germi’s statement is the expression “manipulating its plot,” which alludes to something pre-existent being precisely used, treated and handled. Gadda’s material becomes the body upon which the manipulative operation of Germi’s adaptation acts. The sphere of authorial intervention encompasses not only the cinematic field but also, as already stated, the writing stage, which arises from an alerted auscultative ability of a consumed reader (“I am an impassioned reader of detective stories”). Another transversal hint to Gadda’s ghost is in the allusion to the “inexistence of the detective novel and film in Italy” and to our “inability to make them.” Germi’s answer, “I wanted to give it a try,” condenses in his efforts both a cinematic and a written action. The adaptation wants to substitute the initial archtext and, whether because of an anxiety of influence or not, Gadda’s presence is omitted—however one may infer that this is a somewhat problematic erasure. There is something mechanical in this rewriting operation, which leaves Germi amused, but cold: as a matter of fact, we will see how this film represents instead a central moment in the artist’s filmography. Germi will start his exploration in the field of comedy, and comedy Italian Style, animated by a resentful gaze, furiously grotesque, which finds its roots, as pointed out by Mario Sesti (Sesti 1997, 82—97), in his encounter with Gadda’s work. One can sense this reading between the lines of his Facts of a Murder, a veritable watershed in Germi’s career. Let us return to the preceding facts. The idea for the film came from the producer, Giuseppe Amato, who wanted to draw a cinematic adaptation from Gadda’s novel, which itself had been a great success, despite thinking that a script from the novel would not be possible, owing to the unreadability of the volume. He presented his proposal to Germi, who, while reading the book, became “bewildered,” (Sesti 1997, 84) and did not even finish reading it. Amato made a bet with the other two screenwriters, Giannetti and De Concini, that the enterprise would prove impossible. The three men answered with a perfectly functioning script, ready for production. Undoubtedly the text was greatly manipulated and the authors intervened by making significant changes, which we will analyze later in detail.

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In the meantime, what follows is a brief synopsis of the film. The film begins with the fast-moving scenes that follow a robbery at a big, elegant palace in downtown Rome: the investigation into the robbery is lead by inspector Ingravallo, played by Germi himself. While questioning the tenants, he meets Ms. Liliana Banducci and the suspicions for the robbery fall upon Diomede, fiancé of Assuntina, her young maid played by Claudia Cardinale. The young man, once interrogated, demonstrates his innocence, thanks to the alibi offered to him by a woman, the rich American tourist with whom he had spent the night. The inspector gets rid of him, prompting Assuntina to find a better fiancé for herself. Later on Ms. Banducci’s cousin, Massimo Valdarena, discovers her dead body in her apartment, and becomes the prime suspect for her murder, along with Remo Banducci, the victim’s husband, who at the time of the crime was out of town on his job. The two characters foster disquieting suspicions: Valdarena pretends to be a doctor, while running an outpatient clinic with an heliotherapy centre, which in itself suggests illicit meetings; he may receive a certain sum of money from Ms. Banducci’s will, as long as he finishes his studies in Medicine first, which he has obviously not yet completed. Ms. Banducci’s will also surprises the investigating squad because Remo Banducci is entirely left out of it, making the beneficiaries Assuntina and other former servants of Liliana, with the remainder of the money going to charity. While the investigations on the robbery bring about the thief and his dealers’ arrests, the inquiries into the murder reveal the backstage intrigue of the adulterous relationship between Remo Banducci and a former family maid, Virginia, who also maintains a relationship with Valdarena, who, in turn, blackmails Banducci. On the verge of dismissing the case, Ingravallo recovers Assuntina’s apartment key, a newer though defective one, and retraces the murderer’s tracks. His suspicions point, once again, to Diomede, Assuntina’s fiancé. The squad goes to her house in Marino to see her. She is now pregnant and hastily married to the young man. Questioned by the investigating squad, Diomede confesses to having entered Ms. Banducci’s apartment using Assuntina’s key in order to commit a robbery. However, caught in the act by Liliana Banducci, he confesses to having experienced an uncontrollable reaction, which brought him to commit murder. The film closes with Diomede being taken away in the police car while Assuntina, devastated by distress, runs after the vehicle, invoking Diomede’s name in vain.

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At first, on immediate examination of the comparison between text and film, we no longer find ourselves in the Fascist era, but rather in the Italy of the Fifties. The choice, inspired by production conditions, subtracts from the film all the fierce drive of political satire found in the book. However, Germi does not completely eliminate the references to the Ventennio, alluding to it in the form of Remo Banducci’s identification photo, where he is shown wearing the uniform of a small gerarca, and which is distributed to all the police stations: an identity, ill-concealed in a picture hidden away in a closet along with other regime paraphernalia, one to be disclosed and widely reproduced, casting a sinister light on the man who will later reveal himself, in a tardy but expected confession, as having betrayed the poor murdered woman. The differences between Pasticciaccio and Imbroglio do not end here: while the Pasticciaccio closes with neither a conclusion, nor the capture of the Via Merulana murderer, Germi’s film, being a detective story, and wanting to represent an archetypal model of the Italian detective film, ends with the culprit’s full arrest. According to Gadda’s intentions, who often repeated that he did not know who the murderer was, the guilt should have fallen upon a woman, on the character of Virginia: here Germi amplifies a sorrowful sensibility for Gadda’s female universe. He makes Assuntina the living objection to the institution, which arrests the culprit, notwithstanding the awareness that he is a victim of his own poverty, against a constellation of bourgeois figures (Banducci, Valdarena), who, though of respectable appearance, have an amoral substance. These characters are actually responsible for other criminal behaviors, such as adultery, blackmail, and the art of survival through trickery as well as fraudulently taking advantage of the trust of their female victim, Liliana Banducci. Therefore, as in every detective story, there is an ending, and a bitter one, with a murderer who almost appears the less guilty among all the suspects, forced, in a Pasolinian way, into violence, because of misfortune and misery, in opposition to the others, who are apparently innocent, but actually not less guilty than the culprit. Indeed, the whole second part of the film is recreated in an original direction by the screenwriters: different is the connotation of Valdarena, who is even more of a profiteer and more cynical than in the original text; different, too, is the story of the adultery involving Banducci and the young maid Virginia, whose turbid love story is reconstructed, in digression and in flashback Il film, certamente, smonta, scompone e rende irriconoscibile la voce narrante del romanzo [...]. Ma la traduzione del romanzo che Un maledetto

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imbroglio realizza è per certi versi assai sorprendente. Appartiene a quella stirpe, assai esigua, delle grandi traduzioni d’autore di un celebre stile letterario, in cui il cinema assimila completamente al proprio interno il romanzo modificandolo come fa la natura con i fossili, trasformando completamente la chimica interna degli organismi ma lasciandone intatta la struttura e la fisionomia, una sorta di mineralizzazione del romanzo in cui il cinema conserva la forma e sostituisce completamente la materia di cui è composta (Sesti 1997, 94). The film certainly dismantles, distorts and renders unrecognizable the voice of the novel’s narrator […]. But the translation of the novel that Facts of a Murder makes is in some ways quite surprising. It belongs to that scant lineage of great authorial translations of celebrated literary style, wherein cinema completely assimilates itself to the novel, modifying it as nature does with fossils, completely changing the internal chemistry of organisms but leaving the structure and physiognomy intact, a sort of mineralization of the novel in which cinema conserves the form and completely substitutes the material of which it is composed.

In the second part of the film, Germi greatly enjoys manipulating the plot until he makes the film his own creature, as is clear from his declaration: Per quanto mi riguarda—anche se in Un maledetto imbroglio, vaghissimamente, mi riferivo al romanzo di Gadda—non ho tratto niente altro da opere letterarie. […] Vede, del Pasticciaccio non è rimasto quasi niente, forse sbagliando perché, probabilmente, il romanzo ha qualche cosa che nel film non c’è. In realtà non è rimasto nulla, tranne qualche personaggio grossolanamente agganciato al modello del libro. Io mi difendo, insomma, da questa tendenza di cui voi parlate; in generale, mi sembrerebbe un sintomo di decadenza, per il cinema, ridursi a cercare le sue storie nei romanzi. Per quanto mi riguarda, mi sentirei diminuito se risultasse che nel mio lavoro mi agganciassi alla letteratura. Io credo nella assoluta autonomia del cinema; non solo, ma credo che sia molto difficile che un film veramente importante nasca da un libro. [...] Ma per tornare a noi, difendo il cinema—e me in particolare—da questa accusa di saccheggiare la letteratura perché credo nell’autonomia del cinema, l’unica sua strada vera [...]. Forse che un regista non è l’autore del suo film per l’eterogeneità degli elementi di cui si serve? (D’Avack 1964, quoted in Caldiron 2004, 52) As far as I am concerned—even if in Facts of a Murder I was making an extremely vague reference to Gadda’s novel—I never drew anything else from literary works. […] You see, almost nothing remained of the Pasticciaccio, and maybe it was a mistake, because, probably, the novel has something that is not in the movie. Actually nothing remained, but some characters roughly linked to the novel’s model. In other words, I

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Pietro Germi and That Awful Mess on Via Merulana defend myself from this trend you are talking about: generally speaking, it would seem to me a symptom of decadence, for cinema, to reduce itself to looking for its stories in novels. As far as I am concerned, I would feel diminished if it turned out that in my work I am linked to literature. I believe in the absolute autonomy of cinema: not only, I also believe that it would be extremely difficult that a very important film could originate from a book. […] However, to come back to our argument, I defend cinema—and particularly myself—from this accusation of plundering literature because I believe in cinema’s autonomy, its only true way […]. The director is the author of his film for the heterogeneity of the elements he makes use of, isn’t he?

In Germi’s words, one can hear the echo of the French Nouvelle Vague’s debate on the status of the director as an auteur. The discussion, initiated by an article by Alexandre Astruc, published in 1948 in the review L’Ecran Français, titled “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo,” supported the autonomy of cinema in the specificity of a cinematic écriture realized through the camera. the scriptwriter ceases to exist, for in this kind of film-making the distinction between author and director lose all meaning. Direction is no longer a means of illustrating or presenting a scene, but a true act of writing. The film-maker/author writes with his camera as a writer writes with his pen. In an art in which a length of film and sound-track is put in motion and proceeds, by means of a certain form and a certain story (there can even be no story at all—it matters little), to evolve a philosophy of life, how can one possibly distinguish between the man who conceives the work and the man who writes it? Could one imagine a Faulkner novel written by someone other than Faulkner? And would Citizen Kane be satisfactory in any other form than that given to it by Orson Welles? (Astruc 1948)

The claim of a “personal” cinema, having a distinct style and thematic constants, but mostly having a specific “world vision,” seems evident in the French Nouvelle Vague’s manifesto, François Truffaut’s article “A Certain tendency of the French Cinema,” published in Les Cahiers du Cinema in 1954 which, borrowing Astruc’s concept of the authorial figure of the director, amplifies and contextualizes it in the realm of the French cinematic productions of that age. For Truffaut, the new film would resemble the person who made it, not so much through autobiographical content but rather through the style, which impregnates the film with the personality of its director. Intrinsically strong directors, auteur theory argued, will exhibit over the years a recognizable stylistic and thematic personality, even when they

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work in Hollywood studios. In short, real talent will “out” no matter the circumstances. In a 1957 article, “La Politique des auteurs”, Bazin summarized auteurism as “choosing in the artistic creation the personal factor as a criterion of reference, and then postulating its permanence and even its progress from one work to the next” (Stam 2000, 84—85). Germi’s anxiety of influence towards Gadda, apparent in his previous declarations, now assumes a different connotation, inscribed, as it appears, in the debate on cinema’s autonomy from literature and on the status of the director as an auteur. We already noticed how Germi wishes to assimilate his “first Italian detective film” into the stream of all his other works, underlining with emphasis the presence of a shared sensibility and world vision: “in the representation of characters, of things, at the end it should come out, more or less, a certain sense of reality and life which should somehow connect to my other movies.” Germi seems to echo, in this formulation, the Bazinian and Truffautian terms of the auteurs’ theory, in the spirit of the debate on auteurism in the Fifties. However, it is in his declaration on the relationships between cinema and literature that Germi appears radical in his manifest need to claim complete autonomy from the literary source: he even speaks of decadence with reference to any possible derivation of a cinematic work from literature, and of a perception of himself as “diminished” if the literary referent were to interfere with the autonomous production of the film specific. On the same occasion, in a discussion on the relationships between cinema and literature, Germi continues his attack on those who make cinema, drawing their films from great and successful novels, first, among others, Visconti. È molto più comodo partire da un romanzo, è un aiuto, si trova tutto il materiale, atmosfere, personaggi, un solido impianto narrativo; naturalmente questo modo di far film può dipendere o da pigrizia o da mancanza di fantasia, da calcoli commerciali. Un romanzo che ha avuto molto successo può offrire l’occasione per il successo del film. [...] A me in verità, sembra che una certa larghezza nel ricorrere ai romanzi derivi proprio da motivi di mimetismo industriale. D’altra parte mi pare che ci siano molti film, magari modesti, ma nei quali c’è ricchezza di idée, fermenti di cose. A me un film come I mostri interessa molto di più di Il Gattopardo.Nella narrativa si fanno molte esperienze, con grande libertà, perché non costa niente: per scrivere un libro basta il tempo e una risma di carta. C’è sempre una maggiore libertà, ma non so se sia un vantaggio, perché si tratta di una libertà indiscriminata che spesso conduce alla bizzarria. Le esperienze più avanzate della letteratura mi lasciano proprio

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Pietro Germi and That Awful Mess on Via Merulana indifferente. Il cinema invece, essendo più legato a dei fatti di largo consumo, ha una maggiore concretezza di linguaggio che solo apparentemente potrebbe apparire una tradizionalità di linguaggio. In realtà abbiamo visto che anche nel cinema si sono trovati modi di espressione molto liberi e spregiudicati, fin troppo! Non che la libertà sia mai troppa, ma alle volte diventa gratuita. Quindi non direi che la letteratura sia più avanti del cinema. Per quanto riguarda l’Italia, il contributo culturale più vivo del dopoguerra mi pare che l’abbia dato proprio il cinema. In fondo, tutta la freschezza del cinema italiano nasceva da un vuoto, dal nulla della letteratura (D’Avack 1964, quoted in Caldiron 2004, 53). It is much more convenient to start from a novel, it is a help, one can find all the material, atmospheres, characters, a solid narrative framework; naturally making movies this way may depend on laziness or lack of imagination, on commercial calculations. A novel, which obtained a great success, may offer the opportunity for a successful movie. […] It actually seems to me that resorting to novels is sometimes a result of industrial mimicry. On the other hand, it seems to me that there are many films, maybe unassuming, in which, however, there is richness of ideas, a ferment of things. For me a movie like Monsters appears much more interesting than The Leopard. In fiction one can have a lot of experiences, with great freedom, because it does not cost anything: time and a ream of paper are sufficient to write a book. There is always a greater freedom, but I don’t know if it is an advantage, because it is an indiscriminate freedom that often leads to weirdness. Cinema instead, being more linked to wide consumption, has a greater concreteness of language that only apparently could appear a tradition of language. Indeed, we saw that even in cinema one has found more free and unconventional ways of expression, even too much! It is not that freedom is always too much, but sometimes it becomes gratuitous. So I would not say that literature is far ahead of cinema. As far as Italy is concerned, the liveliest cultural contribution in the postwar period has actually been given by cinema. After all, all the freshness of the Italian cinema was born from a vacuum, from literature’s nothingness.

Germi uses very strong words to define the differences between cinema and literature, identifying, in the choice of reproducing successful novels, both factors of marketability—and we saw how the actual production of Facts of a Murder was born precisely from the stimulation provided by the commercial success of the book—and the decisive factors of cinematic quality. Among those, language’s concreteness is one, resulting from the needs of a wider audience’s consumption of cinema, versus the experimentalisms of the contemporary literary field, those that Germi defines as “the more advanced literature’s experiences.” Germi blames literature for its disappearance, while contributing to the generation

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of the neorealist cinematic wave, “the liveliest cultural contribution of the postwar period,” whose “freshness” was born from “literature’s nothingness”—a very harsh judgment, very one-sided and unfair towards a literature that has produced writers such as Moravia, Calvino, Pavese and Fenoglio. Nevertheless, it becomes clear how, in the comparisons between arts, Germi partakes decisively of cinema, conceived as a creative phenomenon, fruit of a series of complex productive conditions, contra a literature never forced to face, in the realization of its creativity, the circumstances of production. Germi is a craftsman, and he defends, even economically, the complex status of his art devoted to the masses, born from group collaboration and from a heavily economically conditioned creativity. Hence his emphasis on concreteness contrasted with experimentalism, and his accent on the solidity of his own cinema, as well as that of the neorealist Italian cinema. Elsewhere he will claim to believe in Italian literature, which seems to him “lively, diverse as no other in Europe,” (Quilici 1963, quoted in Aprà, Armenzoni and Pistagnesi 1989, 46) quoting director-writer Mario Soldati, who interests Germi “enormously for his gusto for the plot, for the subtle constructions that he erects with so much cleverness, for his moral problems” (Quilici 1963, quoted in Aprà and Armenzoni and Pistagnesi 1989, 47). Obviously, the reading coordinates of Soldati’s works can be considered guidelines also in Germi’s reading of Gadda, focusing on the plot and on the moral problems that undoubtedly unite the two authors’ perspectives. Plot and moralism are indeed the two supporting axis of Facts of a Murder, the two fundamental criteria to untangle the Gaddian knot in the linear, relentlessly progressive advance of the plot, up to the solution of the murder. Getting back to Germi’s declarations on cinema and literature, according to the old debate on the adaptation’s “fidelity” to its source, during the Pasticciaccio’s adaptation the need for autonomy in Germi expresses itself in a cinematic translation “extremely vaguely” inspired by the Gaddian intertext, aware of letting go if not much, perhaps too much: “You see, almost nothing remained of the Pasticciaccio, and maybe it was a mistake, because, probably, the novel has something that is not in the movie. Actually nothing remained, but some characters roughly linked to the novel’s model.” What intersects the two texts, according to Germi, seems to be a grip, “roughly” derived by the fictional intertext, on the level of the plot and of some role characterization. In reality, the interpenetration of Gadda’s literary universe with Germi’s cinematic one works at great depth in the film. However, Germi dismisses his own perception of his betrayal to the Gaddian text, not having captured its fundamental nature. Initially, the project harbored great intentions of creating a polyphonic

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fresco similar to Gadda’s novel, at least from the evidence gathered by Enrico Giacovelli between the lines of the weekly magazine Epoca: “La riduzione del romanzo è molto difficile”, scriveva Germi a lavoro appena iniziato, “ma se i nostri sforzi giungeranno a buon fine, il Pasticciaccio sarà non solo il primo film poliziesco italiano, ma un grande panorama di cose e personaggi, un quadro vasto e popoloso, ridondante e barocco” (Giacovelli 1990, 71). “The adaptation of the novel is very difficult,” wrote Germi at the beginning of his work, “however, if our efforts bring us to a successful conclusion, the Pasticciaccio will be not only the first Italian detective movie, but also a great panorama of things and characters, a vast and populous picture, redundant and baroque.”

It is exactly the redundant and baroque nature, with categories of certain Gaddian pertinence, which gets lost in the transition between the written page and the film, the linguistic polyphony of his “vast and populous picture.” Germi intervenes, unraveling the fundamental image of the Pasticciaccio, the tangle or muddle, which metaphorically expresses the unreadability of the real: [Ingravallo] Sosteneva, fra l’altro, che le inopinate catastrofi non sono mai la conseguenza o l’effetto che dir si voglia d’un unico motivo, di una causa al singolare: ma sono come un vortice, un punto di depressione ciclonica nella coscienza del mondo, verso cui hanno cospirato tutta una molteplicità di causali convergenti. Diceva anche nodo o groviglio, o garbuglio, o gnommero, che alla romana vuol dire gomitolo. […] Così, proprio così avveniva dei “suoi” delitti. “Quanno me chiammeno!... Già. Si me chiammeno a me… può sta ssicure ch’è nu guaio; qualche gliuommero… de sberretà…” diceva, contaminando napolitano, molisano e italiano (Gadda 1982, 2—3). He sustained, among other things, that unforeseen catastrophes are never the consequence or the effect, if you prefer, of a single motive, of a cause singular; but they are rather like a whirlpool, a cyclonic point of depression in the consciousness of the world, towards which a whole multitude of converging causes have contributed. He also uses words like knot or tangle, or muddle, or gnommero, which in Roman dialect means skein. […] This was how, exactly, he defined “his” crimes. “When they call me…Sure. If they call me, you can be sure that there’s trouble: some mess, some gliuommero to untangle,” he would say, garbling his Italian with the dialects of Naples and the Molise (Gadda 1984, 5).

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Germi substitutes this metaphor with a similar, but more organic, almost mortuary image, nearly evoking decomposition: “It is like when in the countryside you remove a stone and underneath you find worms.” The proceeding of the cognitive inquiry which has to land on truth no longer finds “a cyclonic point of depression in the consciousness of the world,” a cosmic, meteorological and aerial metaphor, but rather the flat and mortal dimension of the putrefied organism under his tombstone, metaphor of the bourgeois respectability which hides the moral rottenness of its true face, a pre-existing cause that surrounds the criminal matrix with its procession of horror and disgust. The movement is, more than a vortex, one of a reversal (Tedeschi Turco 2005, 110). Indeed the second part of the movie, which makes the treatment decisively “original” in comparison with the Pasticciaccio (the screenwriters obtained an Argent Ribbon for the best original treatment in this regard!), is all based on reversal and coups de théâtre: from the revelation of the final will, to the discovery of the semiillicit activities of Valdarena; from the confession, including a long flashback, of the betrayal of Remo Banducci along with the maid Virginia, to the intrigue and the blackmail of Virginia and Valdarena, and Diomede’s confession to the murder. Surely, the reversal is a fundamental narrative mechanism of the detective genre. However, in this film this mechanism works in a horizon of contamination and rottenness, with a clear allusion, by Germi, not to the unreadability of the world but rather to its readability in the form of criminal proliferation and moral condemnation. It is in this horizon that one of the author’s personal myths, that of the Law, appears—something which runs through the Germi’s filmography since its beginning in his Gioventù perduta (1947), to continue with his movie La città si difende (1951), and through all the comedies that follow Facts of a Murder, from Divorzio all’italiana (1961), to Sedotta e abbandonata (1963). Sin dall’inizio il mito della legge è il grande mito personale del regista. La legge come apparato istituzionale di codici, tribunali, prigioni, casellari giudiziari, ma anche come sistema morale che ispira la condotta del singolo, che responsabilizza i comportamenti individuali nei confronti degli altri e di se stessi. Naturalmente i motivi ricorrenti della legge, della giustizia, della colpa non sono visti soltanto nello scenario esterno, burocratico, impositivo dell’istituzione, ma anche nello scenario interiore della coscienza, del dover essere, della scelta morale. L’ossessione della legge ritornerà a più riprese nel corso di tutta l’opera di Pietro Germi come ancora di salvezza, punto fermo nei disordini del singolo e nella trasgressione del privato, estremo tentativo di esorcismo nei confronti dell’irrazionalità dell’esperienza (Caldiron 2004, 10).

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Pietro Germi and That Awful Mess on Via Merulana From the beginning, the mito della legge was the director’s great personal myth. The Law as an institutional apparatus of codes, tribunals, prisons, criminal-records offices, but also as a moral system that inspires the conduct of the individual, that makes the individual aware of her/his behavior with regards to others and to her/himself. Naturally, the recurrent motifs of law, justice, and guilt are not only in the institution’s external, bureaucratic, categorical scenario, but also in the interior scenario of consciousness, of the necessity of being, of moral choice. In many scenes throughout Pietro Germi’s work, this obsession with the law recurs as an anchor of salvation, a stable point in the individual’s disorders and in the transgression of the private, an extreme attempt at exorcism in the face of the irrationality of experience.

Undoubtedly the constellations of the moral, the guilt and the law represent a critical point of view in the interpretation of Facts of a Murder, even if the law as institution and the law as justice do not coincide. At one point, Germi/Ingravallo declares his impotence to Valdarena: “I can’t remember any article of the code to send you to jail.” Afterwards the inspector, facing the pathetic clash between the blackmailer Valdarena and the adulterous Banducci, can only react in the ineffectual and individual terms of the slap in the face: “It is a personal matter,” he says. Completely different instead is Ingravallo’s attitude towards the desperate confession of Diomede and the absolute love of Assuntina for her man. Notwithstanding the triumph of the law, there is no justice for the victims and for those culprits whose fate has forced to slip into crime, in opposition to those whose vices and violations proliferate beyond a façade of bourgeois respectability. Germi’s moralism appears predominant in the figure of Ingravallo, linked to a level of impersonation and personal participation that was born by the fusion of Ingravallo’s character with that of Germi, the actor. Germi himself underlines this aspect in his declarations, in a “screen discourse” that, in a trilogy, also encompasses his previous movies The railman (1956) and The straw man (1958). In fondo, il mio carattere entra nei miei film in certi personaggi, specie in quelli che ho interpretato io: certi piccoli dati autobiografici nel complesso vengono fuori, da L’uomo di paglia a Un maledetto imbroglio; dai film fatti come attore si ha un’idea abbastanza precisa di come sono io (Gambetti ed. 1964; also Gambetti 1965, Caldiron 2004, 57). After all, my nature enters my movies in certain characters, mostly in those played by me: on the whole some little autobiographical data come out, from The Straw man to Facts of a Murder; from the films made as an actor, one can get a rather precise idea of how I am.

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A withdrawn character, irritable and intense, who reacts with empathy and fascination to the prevailing female world of the victims, and who, in contrast, acts as the judge of the various “culprits,” by harshly criticizing them. This is a problematic moralism for Pasolini, who accuses Germi of narcissistic qualunquismo [political apathy], which also reflects on his presence as an actor, in his body and his gestures. ma la cristallizzazione psicologica di Germi rientra nel suo lavoro, non è un dato oscuro o implicito soltanto. Ed eccone la fenomenologia: il culto della “salute”, sessuale, morale e sociale è, di per sé, un dato assolutamente irrazionale: una forma di difesa istintiva e inconscia o quasi. Specie poi se diviene così rigida, e anche rigorosa, come in Germi. Tutta la psicologia di questo regista è come bloccata da tale irrazionalità, che, ne sono certo, rifiuta, su se stessa, ogni discussione. Di conseguenza c’è in Germi una forte diffidenza verso tutto ciò che è razionale: per lui la coincidenza tra “razionale” e “intellettualistico” è un assioma che non si discute… Tutto deve essere affidato al sentimento, e il sentimento deve posare sulle reazioni di una morale normale e corrente. Va aggiunto, poi, che la morale di Germi tanto normale e corrente non è. Proprio per quello che dicevo prima: perché c’è in lui una profonda ferita, una esaltazione non arginata della propria personalità ecc. ecc. La sua è una morale piena di elementi protestantici e puritani (Pasolini 1996, 18). But Germi’s psychological crystallization enters into his work, it is not merely dark and implicit. And here is the phenomenology: the cult of “health,” sexual, moral and social, is, in and of itself, absolutely irrational: a form of instinctive and unconscious defense, or almost. Especially if it becomes so rigid, and rigorous, as it is in Germi. It is as if all of this director’s psychology is blocked by an irrationality that, I am certain, refuses, within itself, all discussion. As a consequence, in Germi there is a strong defiance against all that is rational: for him the connection between “rational” and “intellectualistic” is an axiom that is not open to discussion…All must be entrusted to sentiment, and sentiment must rest on the reactions of a normal and current morality. It must be added, then, that Germi’s morality is neither very normal nor very current. Precisely for the reasons I explained earlier: because within him there is a profound wound, an unrestrained exaltation of his own personality, etc. etc. His is a morality full of protestant and puritanical elements.

Pasolini’s arrows point particularly to the character of the “strange commendatore Anzaloni,” so defined in the closing credits: a figure that does not correspond to the atmosphere of “androecium, of a gym or barrack shower” which, according to the Friulan director, one finds in Germi’s movies. The commendatore is presented enwrapped in an “odd robe’ (so defined by the newspapers covering the robbery) and he is a

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habitué of meeting places for underworld hooligans with the typical faces of the Pasolinian ragazzi. Pasolini points out how Anzaloni, among other men, at the tavern, among policemen and carabinieri, does not share the ritual of the drinking on the edge of town, “to the point that IngravalloGermi, when shaking his hand, has the impression of withdrawing a hand dirty with who knows which vaguely mephitic substance, in the face of which he turns up his uncertain nose, with a virile naivety,” says Pasolini (Pasolini 1996, 17). His conclusion is strong: “The homoeroticism (as Gadda would call it) of Germi produces a rhetoric of “health,” often with stylistic results of very much doubtful taste” (Pasolini 1996, 18). The same “rhetoric of health,” if, on the one hand, generates the condemnation of the homosexual in the figure of the Commendatore Anzaloni, as well as the elision of the Gaddian motif of latent lesbianism in Liliana, on the other hand it also anaesthetizes the sexual impulse towards women, zeroing a level of interpretation that was instead clearly present in Gadda’s text. If Gadda’s Ingravallo, when meeting Assuntina, cannot but admire her beauty and feel physically attracted to her, as well as be equally affected by the beauty of Liliana Banducci, Germi’s Ingravallo shows a different behavior. Even if heavily fascinated by both Assunta and Liliana, with apexes of sentimental commotion, he has, however, a solitary and regular life style (“I have a lover too,” says to Remo Banducci, with an air of complicity) in a squalid room full of old newspapers, measured by the phone calls of the mysterious “Signorina Paola,” with whom he has a relationship1. The only function of this absence/presence of a woman is to exorcize any possible sexual drive in the reaction of the inspector to the female universe: Miss Paola indicates to the spectator the sexual unavailability and monogamous legitimatization of the inspector, who, dominated in a repressed manner by female beauty, channels this attraction into the more delicate and deeper field, however conventional, of the sentiment. Paola is inaccessible in that she is only a telephonic presence, and although she guarantees the protagonist’s heterosexuality and thus his “health,” her presence makes the other women morally unapproachable. Therefore, Ingravallo manifests a feeling of protection that hides, almost completely, his sexual attraction towards these women. This is clearly visible in the scene concerning the discovery of Liliana Banducci’s corpse, so profoundly distinct in the fictional text in comparison with its cinematic parallel, precisely due to the total absence of any reference to Liliana’s sexuality in the film. 1

For another interpretation of “la Signorina Paola,” see Ricci 2005, 84—99.

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Gadda describes Liliana’s corpse in this way: Il corpo della povera signora giaceva in una posizione infame, supino, con la gonna di lana grigia e una sottogonna bianca buttate all’indietro, fin quasi al petto: come se alcuno avesse voluto scoprire il candore affascinante di quel dessous, o indagarne lo stato di nettezza. Aveva mutande bianche, di maglia a punto gentile, sottilissimo, che terminavano a metà coscia in una delicata orlatura. Tra l’orlatura e le calze, ch’erano in una lieve luce di seta, denudò se stessa la bianchezza estrema della carne, d’un pallore da clorosi: quelle due cosce un po’ aperte, che i due elastici— in un tono di lilla—parevano distinguere in grado, avevano perduto il loro tepido senso, già si adeguavano al gelo: al gelo del sarcofago e delle taciturne dimore. L’esatto officiare del punto a maglia, per lo sguardo di quei frequentatori di domestiche, modellò inutilmente le stanche proposte d’una voluttà il cui ardore, il cui fremito, pareva essersi appena esalato dalla dolce mollezza del monte, da quella riga, il segno carnale del mistero… quella che Michelangelo (don Ciccio ne rivide la fatica, a San Lorenzo) aveva creduto opportuno di dover omettere. Pignolerie! Lassa perde! Le giarrettiere tese, ondulate appena agli orli, d’una ondulazione chiara di lattuga: l’elastico di seta lilla, in quel tono che pareva dare un profumo, significava a momenti la frale gentilezza e della donna e del ceto, l’eleganza spenta degli indumenti, degli atti, il secreto modo della sommissione, tramutata ora nell’immobilità di un oggetto, o come di uno sfigurato manichino. Tese, le calze, in una eleganza bionda quasi una nuova pelle, dàtale (sopra il tepore creato) dalla fiaba degli anni nuovi, dalle magliatrici blasfeme: le claze incorticavano di quel velo di lor luce il modellato delle gambe, dei meravigliosi ginocchi: delle gambe un po’ divaricate, come ad un invito orribile. Oh, gli occhi! Dove, chi guardavano? Il volto!... Oh, era sgraffiata, poverina! Fin sotto un occhio, sur naso! … Oh quel viso! Com’era stanco, sstanco, povera Liliana, quel capo, nel nimbo, che l’avvolgeva, dei capelli, fili tuttavia operosi della carità. Affilato nel pallore, il volto: sfinito, emaciato dalla suzione atroce della Morte. Un profondo, un terribile taglio rosso le apriva la gola, ferocemente. Aveva preso metà il collo, dal davanti verso destra, cioè verso sinistra, per lei, destra per coloro che guardavano: sfrangiato ai due margini come da un reiterarsi dei colpi, lama o punta: un orrore! Da nun potesse vede. Palesava come delle filacce rosse, all’interno, tra quella spumiccia nera der sangue, cià raggrumato a momenti; un pasticcio! Con delle bollicine rimaste a mezzo. Curiose forme, agli agenti: parevano buchi, al novizio, come dei maccheroncini color rosso, o rosa. “La trachea,” mormorò Ingravallo chinandosi “la carotide! La iugulare… Dio!” (Gadda 1982, 58—59) The body of the poor signora was lying in an infamous position, supine, the gray wool skirt and a white petticoat thrown back, almost to her

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Pietro Germi and That Awful Mess on Via Merulana breast: as if someone had wanted to uncover the fascinating whiteness of that dessous, or inquire into its state of cleanliness. She was wearing white underpants, of elegant jersey, very fine, which ended half way down the thighs with a delicate edging. Between the edging and the stockings, which were a light-shaded silk, the extreme whiteness of the flesh lay naked, of a chlorotic pallor: those two thighs, slightly parted, on which the garters—a lilac hue—seemed to confer a distinction of rank, had lost their tepid sense, were already becoming used to the chill: to the chills of the sarcophagus and of man’s taciturn, final abode. The precise work of the knitting, to the eyes of those used to frequenting maidservants, shaped uselessly the weary proposals of a voluptuousness whose ardor, whose shudder, seemed to have barely been exhaled from the gentle softness of that hill, from that central line, the carnal mark of the mystery… the one that Michelangelo (Don Ciccio mentally saw again his great work, at San Lorenzo) had thought it wisest to omit. Details! Skip it! The tight garters, curled slightly at the edges, with a clear, lettuce-like curl: the elastic of lilac silk, in that hue that seemed in itself to give off a perfume, to signify at the same time the frail gentleness both of the woman and of her station, the spent elegance of her clothing, of her gestures, the secret manner of her submission, transmuted now into the immobility of an object, or as if of a disfigured dummy. Taut, the stockings, in a blond elegance like a new skin, given to her (above the created warmth) by the fable of our years, the blasphemy of the knitting machines: the stockings sheathed the shape of the legs with their light veil, the modeling of the marvelous knees: those legs lightly spread, as if in horrible invitation. Oh! The eyes! Where, at whom where they looking? The face! ... Oh, it was scratched, poor object! Under one eye, on the nose! Oh that face! How weary it was, weary, poor Liliana, that head in the cloud of hair that enfolded it, those strands performing a final work of mercy. Sharpened in its pallor, the face: worn, emaciated by the atrocious suction of Death. A deep, a terrible red cut opened her throat, fiercely. It had taken half of the neck, from the front towards the right, that is, toward her left, the right for those who were looking down: jagged at its two edges, as if by a series of blows, of the blade or point: a horror! You couldn’t stand to look at it. From it hung red strands, like thongs, from the black foam of the blood, almost clotted already; a mess! with some little bubbles still in the midst. Curious forms, to the policemen: they seemed holes, to the novice, like red-colored little maccheroni, or pink. “The trachea,” murmured Ingravallo, bending down, “the carotid, the jugular! ... God!” (Gadda 1984, 67—69)

The scene presented by Germi is different. We have just seen Germi/Ingravallo leaving a touching meeting with Liliana, where, around the object of a doll, the whole personal drama of the woman who missed her call to maternity emerged, with a strong emotional bonding between the two characters. With a fade, we find a new character (Valdarena)

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entering the building from the rain, climbing the stairs and ringing the bell, but the door is ajar… Valdarena gets inside the apartment and in shock discovers the dead body. Germi presents the corpse with a very brief shot; it appears only for a few seconds, the black skirt down to the knees, the legs crossed one over the other, the figure in torsion, in a serpentine position, if one can use a Michelangiolesque terminology. This seems a quotation from Michelangelo, the position of a stretched out Sybil, more than a reference to the Medici’s graves, as in Gadda’s passage. Afterwards, the corpse is shot from the opposite side: we see it shot in the direction of the feet, with the overturned head, the disheveled hair, and blood everywhere. Everything lasts only for a few seconds: Germi’s gaze does not linger over the corpse; instead, it follows Valdarena’s reactions. The man, after having closed the door and set the phone back on its hook, after automatically lifting the receiver to ask for help, gets up outrageously and, stepping twice over the corpse, grasps the envelope with his own name on it, an envelope—we will discover later—which contains money for him. Germi focuses then on the offense perpetuated against the victim and on Valdarena’s ruthless cynicism, while omitting any reference whatsoever to the woman’s sexuality, something which, instead, is clearly the focus of Gadda’s description. What follows is an exchange between two policemen, during the investigation carried out by the forensic department: —Bella donna. —Quanti anni aveva? —37. —Portati bene. —Portati poco, poveraccia

—A beautiful woman —How old was she? —37 years old. —She wore her 37 years very well. —But too briefly, poor thing. This refers every comment on the woman’s beauty and on her sexuality to the terrible tragedy, which overthrew her, provoking compassion and pity, against what actually happened around the corpse at the time of Valdarena’s discovery of the murder. We can discern in these two scenes-one from the literary text and the other from the cinematic—the two different styles of the two authors, as underlined by Mario Sesti in his essay on Gadda and Germi.

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Pietro Germi and That Awful Mess on Via Merulana Gadda lavora quasi sempre sull’ “inquadratura”, analizzandola, ipertrofizzandola, infittendola di dettagli, veri e propri morphing lessicali che trasformano i corpi in animali o creature mitiche, i paesaggi in affreschi neoclassici, architetture barocche, scorci metafisici con trasformazioni morfologiche in cui il quotidiano è investito dall’instabilità strutturale di un’immaginazione furiosa. Germi lavora invece sulla sequenza, sul montaggio, sull’impennata emotiva di un attacco imprevisto o di una panoramica che rompono l’equilibrio di un’ottica o di una composizione; non costringe mai il narratore a smascherarsi, ma concentra il discorso del Pasticciaccio, le autentiche connotazioni gaddiane, all’interno del personaggio protagonista. Che guarda caso, ha la sua apparenza fisica, la sua identità biologica. Ma soprattutto piega il romanzo al cinema dissolvendo quella sovraimposizione del narratore per trasferirla in un punto di vista irreperibile, in quella apparente naturalezza, in quella autonomia semantica che è il primo requisito ontologico del cinema in quanto tale e della quale, guarda caso, Pasolini fu uno dei più inventivi teorici. La cosa più sorprendente, come vorremmo sottolineare, è che qualcosa come una tale “sovraimposizione” caratterizzerà, invece, lo stile delle sue commedie (Sesti 1997, 95). Gadda almost always works on the frame, analyzing it, overgrowing it, filling it with details, real lexical morphing that transforms bodies into animals or mythical creatures, landscapes into neoclassical frescoes, baroque architectures, metaphysical twists with morphological transformations in which the quotidian is run over by the structural instability of a furious imagination. Germi works instead on the sequence, on montage, on the emotional upsurge of an unexpected beginning or a panning shot that break the equilibrium of a viewpoint or a composition; he never forces the narrator to remove his mask, but rather he concentrates the Pasticciaccio’s discourse, the authentic Gaddian connotations, on the inside of the main character, who obviously has his own physical appearance, his own biological identity. But above all he bends the novel to cinema, dissolving that super-imposition of the narrator in order to transfer it to an untraceable point of view, in that apparent naturalness, in that semantic autonomy, of which Pasolini was one of the most inventive theorists, that is the first ontological requisite of cinema itself. The most surprising thing, which we would like to highlight, is that something such as this “super-imposition” will characterize, instead, the style of his comedies.

Sequence against shot, then, but undoubtedly true is that both authors hold a fascination with the female world, mysterious yet held at a distance by Gadda’s deforming style—which is occasionally as charmed as much as it is misogynistic—as well as by Germi’s gaze, equally fascinated but suffering, empathetic, and more remote in his neutral eroticism.

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Emblematic is the character of Assuntina who, with her musical theme— the popular song in Roman dialect “Sinnò me moro” [Otherwise I die] by Rustichelli—opens the film even before being on the scene with the theme of the absolute passion, later to be accompanied by this motive at every apparition, up to the film’s ending, with the beautiful sequence of the arrest in Marino which made Pasolini cry for a “masterpiece:” soprattutto una Cardinale che io mi ricorderò per un pezzo. Quegli occhi che guardano solo con gli angoli accanto al naso, quei capelli neri spettinati (unica vera prorompente citazione gaddiana) quel viso di umile, di gatta, e così selvaggiamente perduta nella tragedia: sono dati che danno ragione all’impeto irrazionale di Germi. Il poeta sarà pure un pochino bestione. Basta la figura di Assunta e la scena finale dell’arresto a Marino, per fare di Un maledetto imbroglio, un film memorabile (Pasolini 1996, 20). Above all a Cardinale that I will remember for some time. Those eyes looking with only the angles near her nose, that messy black hair (the only true, irrepressible Gaddian quote) that humble face, like that of a cat, so savagely lost in tragedy: these explain Germi’s irrational impetus. The poet is also a bit of a brute. The figure of Assunta and the final arrest scene at Marino suffice to make Facts of a Murder a memorable film.

A Cardinale upon whose face every accent of comedy stops, a Cardinale who runs after the car of the investigating squad, alike Anna Magnani who runs after the Nazi truck carrying away her partner in Rome Open City. Prey to despair, Assuntina shouts the name of Diomede, suffering in her long and useless chase the pain of a lacerating separation, which is the price to pay to expiate the crime committed by Diomede. During the film appears a digression that reverses the “screen discourse” of the young Cardinale, protagonist in 1958, at her career debut, in Monicelli’s comedy I soliti ignoti [Big Deal on Madonna Street]. With a more or less apparent quotation, Germi in Facts of a Murder portrays the policemen while watching, in the darkness of a room, the shooting of Ms. Banducci’s funeral. Comments, distractions, witticisms: everything reminds us of the similar scene with Mastroianni, Gassman & Co. in front of the pawn shop’s shootings in Big Deal on Madonna Street. After the faces of Remo Banducci and Valdarena, caught in the suspicious act of confabulation, the angelic and agitated face of Assuntina/Cardinale appears on the screen, to Germi/Ingravallo’s remark: “poor girl, she looks aged.” Here Germi plays with the umpteenth image of reversal, in a mirroring game, from the comic Monicellian “film-within-a-film,” to his interpretation of Germi the director in the figure of Ingravallo dealing with

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the police shooting. This reversal comes in addition to the reversal of Cardinale’s role, in her transition from the comedy of Big Deal on Madonna Street to the drama of Facts of a Murder. The cameo from Big Deal on Madonna Street introduces a further level typical of the film: the presence of a comic register together with a dramatic one. Since the beginning, in the agitated robbery scene, we see Germi’s camera furiously following the thief, taken from behind during his flight in the chaos in the heart of Rome. He is chased by a lanky old man (a retired general), who fires into the air with an old gun, and who is subsequently covered in the plaster crumbling onto his head from the ceiling which had been hit by the man’s bullets. In a subsequent gag, a street-sweeper asks why there is so much fuzz and who has been murdered: a boy responds that a Municipality big shot has been killed, and now they will arrest all the street-sweepers, a punch line followed by a chorus of laughter. From the beginning, Germi mixes drama and comedy, and employs this contamination throughout the film, which presents then a tonality of comic divertissement between the lines of the murder drama. Even the policemen maintain comic attitudes in the film: they eat sandwiches all the time, they can’t use the telephones, they lose contact with the people they are tailing, they are competing with the Carabinieri who, in their turn, remark: “Good people, they don’t even seem like policemen;” they shout at their subordinates and they are shouted at by their superiors. However, the comedy stops when the victims, both Assuntina and Liliana, enter the scene. Generally speaking, the robbery is characterized by comic episodes, with the grandiose grotesque of Zamira Mattonari, a reinterpretation of the toothless Gaddian Zamira. Here she is a hostess in a tavern in the Castelli area, who, during a scuffle with her sister because of jealousy, in front of police and Carabinieri, pulls out her incisor crown, piercing the cinematic screen violently with her rickety mouth. From one comic scene to the other, the narrative of the robbery continues with the arrest of the fiancé of the youngest Mattonari sister, caught while running a marathon, with a gag inspired by the coward and whimpering characters of Alberto Sordi. What follows is the arrival of the police squad in Valmelaina and the arrest of the stolen-goods dealers, with a chorus of punch lines and continuous gags. There are no gags, however, along the narrative of the murder, where Germi’s moralism does not forgive, and the easy going attitude of the squad toward the underworld of Roman petty crime leaves room for Ingravallo’s merciless gaze, in his unremitting chase of the murderer. Then

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sarcastic remarks and witticisms accompany with a fierce misanthropy2 the course of the inquiry, up to its coagulation in the famous metaphor of the stone and the worms, after the flashback to Remo Banducci and Virginia’s adultery. This is a meta-cinematic component, narrated with an offstage voice by Banducci himself, a cinematic synthesis of the love story between the elderly husband and the teenaged maid. It expresses now a tonality of bright Lolita-esque sensuality—Virginia is always presented in Banducci’ s tale as if she were a child, but the images give the picture of adult seductiveness now of a parodistic tale, such as in Virginia’s final shout—she does not want to go back to the nuns. Finally however, though mindful of this contamination of registers in his subsequent cinematic making, from Divorce Italian Style to Seduced and Abandoned, Germi ends the film within the dramatic framework, with the last, tragic flashback, that of the homicide, told by Diomede’s voice over, who is, later on, fetched and taken away in Ingravallo’s car, in the most dramatic sequence of the movie. The inspector’s presence fills the film’s last scene: with his dark glasses and his frowning face, not at all at ease, he departs while apparently not paying attention to the harrowing cries of Assuntina, who is running in vain after the car. Overall, the relationship between Germi’s Imbroglio and Gadda’s Pasticciaccio is the complex intersection of two different narrative logics, of two different orientations: one characterized by a functional and agile concatenation of the plot, the other by a linguistic stratification and deformation; one focused on the sequence, the other on the shot. However the spirit of resentful and indignant observation appears to be similar in both authors, with interspersed thrilling comic interludes, dealing with human material that seems to be laughable and sorrowful at the same time. An adaptation is not vampiric: it does not draw the life-blood from its source and leave it dying or dead, nor is it paler than the adapted work. It may, on the contrary, keep that prior work alive, giving it an afterlife it would have never had otherwise. […] adaptation is how stories evolve and mutate to fit new times and different places. [...] Stories too propagate themselves [...]; adaptations—as both repetition and variation—are their form of replication. Evolving by cultural selection, traveling stories adapt to local cultures, just as populations of organisms adapt to local environments. We retell—and show again and interact anew with—stories over and over; in the process, they change with each repetition, and yet they are recognizably the same. What they are is not necessarily inferior or second2

“The irony that confers its unmistakable flavor on the Gaddian page disappears and in its place a rather dissimulated misanthropy encamps” (Attolini 1986, 119).

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Hence the relationship between the two works is a rich intertextual exchange, which starts between the lines of Facts of a Murder and continues in Germi’s gaze over the world in his later production and in his transition to the comedy. In Germi’s adaptation, there is no frame which responds directly to Gadda’s text’s solicitations, but rather a moralist and humorist Gaddian matrix, which penetrates Germi’s imagination, finding wide resonance, perfectly orchestrated with his expert intuition of the mechanisms of plot and of cinematic technique. The sulphureous shadow of Gadda, magisterially handled by the director, will cross as a comic ghost the adventures of the aspiring murderer Fefè in Divorce Italian Style and in the movies that will follow. The adaptation of the Pasticciaccio in Facts of a Murder represents, then, not the course of collision between the two texts, but rather the creation of an orbit in which the two works operate, each one with its own style, in tune.

Works Cited Aprà, Adriano, Massimo Armenzoni and Patrizia Pistagnesi. 1989. Pietro Germi: Ritratto di un regista all’antica. Parma: Pratiche. Astruc, Alexandre. 1948. The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La CameraStylo. L’Ecran Français 144, March 30. Attolini, Vito. 1986. Il cinema di Pietro Germi. Lecce: Elle. Caldiron, Orio. 2004. Pietro Germi, La frontiera e la legge. Rome: Bulzoni. Gadda, Carlo Emilio. 1982. Quer Pasticciaccio Brutto de Via Merulana. Milan: Garzanti. —. 1984. That Awful Mess On Via Merulana. Trans. William Weaver. New York: George Braziller. Gambetti, Giacomo. 1960. Pietro Germi: storia di un uomo all’antica. Ferrania n. n. —. ed. 1964. Sedotta e abbandonata. Bologna: Cappelli. Giacovelli, Enrico. 1990. Pietro Germi. Florence: La Nuova Italia. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 1996. Lo stile di Germi. In I film degli altri by Tullio Kezich. Parma: Guanda. Ricci, Andrea. 2005. Il “Pasticciaccio” di Gadda e “l'Imbroglio” di Germi: Letteratura e cinema noir a confronto. Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 59, 2: 84—99.

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Sesti, Mario. 1997. “Quel maledetto imbroglio:” Gadda e Germi. In Tutto il cinema di Pietro Germi. 82—97. Milan: Baldini & Castoldi,. Stam, Robert. 2000. Film Theory: an Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Tedeschi Turco, Alessandro. 2005. La poesia dell’individuo. Il cinema di Pietro Germi. Verona: Centro Mazziano di Studi e Ricerche-Cierre.

DOG BITES DOG: THE METHOD OF DISRESPECT IN FERRERI’S ADAPTATION OF FLAIANO RICCARDO BOGLIONE

First of all, to produce Shakespeare, one must not give a fuck about Shakespeare. —Carmelo Bene

Melampo (1967), Melampus (1970), La cagna (1972).1 One of the eeriest intellectual periplus in the history of Italian cinema. The screenplay, Melampo, which should have become Ennio Flaiano’s first work as a director, instead it was rejected by several producers (despite the interest shown in it by a few famous actors who loved the story and would have gladly participated in it).2 Flaiano then re-wrote it, turned it into a brief novel whose title, Melampus, is the Latinized version of its precedent. Shortly afterwards, the novel was converted, once again, into a script by Marco Ferreri and Jean Claude Carrière, and subsequently into a film, directed by Ferreri.3 It is important to underline the fact that Ferreri and Carrière’s adaptation was made from the novel, and only the novel. Flaiano did not participate in the development of the LC screenplay at all, in spite of what is said at the beginning of the film.4 On the contrary, he 1 The film circulated, in the Anglo-Saxon world, under the name of Liza, a title that, in a way, humanizes the character played by Catherine Deneuve. By doing so it seems to row against the Ferreri will of reification of the characters (which will be examined later), therefore the Italian title has been preferred and shortened to LC. 2 Among them Faye Dunaway, Claudia Cardinale, Dirk Bogarde, Vittorio Gassman (Tassone 1978, 156—159). 3 A highly detailed version of the genesis of texts and film can be found in the Nota that Aldo Tassone wrote for the posthumous edition of the script (Tassone 1978, 156—163). 4 This is probably the reason why some critics still believe that Flaiano had a part in it: “La cagna (1972) presenta poi un curioso moto ondulatorio: tratto da un libro

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was “excluded” from the writing: a questionable choice, in terms of etiquette,5 but one that allowed Ferreri to completely rework its concept, and direct a film that openly goes against the grain of its literary inspiration. Considering that the matter of fidelity to the original text still remains one of the central issues in the debate about cinematic adaptation, though often denied by critics as such,6 Ferreri’s film proves to be a complicated turn-a-round of Flaiano’s literary universe, in what might be termed as disrespectful praxis of adaptation. It is not merely one of the inevitable differences between book and film (convincingly summed up by Tinazzi in riduzione, trasposizione, dislocazione, rifacimento) but rather, a way of working that reduces the source text to a mere idea, and destroys, one by one, all the formal and essential components of that source. The original script, written at the end of the 1960s and only published posthumously in 1978, tells the story of the amorous relationship that develops between an Italian writer, Giorgio Fabro, living in New York, (where he writes short stories that will be translated into English and published) and a much younger upper class woman, Liza, whom he has met in rather a bizarre way. Giorgio is looking after Melampo, the dog of a di Flaiano che era la riscrittura di una sceneggiatura non realizzata viene in seguito rielaborato dallo stesso scrittore per Ferreri” [LC followed a curious undulatory movement: based on a book by Flaiano that was already the re-writing of an unrealized script, it was lately re-written by the same author for Ferreri] (Tinazzi 2007, 69). All translations in this article are mine. 5 “Oltretutto, [Flaiano] non era stato interpellato per la rituale supervisione della sceneggiatura della Cagna, operazione cui avrebbe forse avuto diritto, in linea di principio” [furthermore, Flaiano was not called upon to supervise the script of “La Cagna,” something that, in principle, he was probably entitled to do] (Tassone 1978, 161). 6 “Di fronte al ventaglio di problematiche e di posizioni ci si rende conto senza difficoltà che alcune vecchie questioni hanno perso di consistenza, a aprire da quella della fedeltà, che riduce l’interferenza tra testi, con tutto ciò che significa sotto il profilo teorico e analitico, a un confronto, che si muove tra la mera comparazione (quel che resta, quel che è tolto, quel che è stato modificato) e il riferimento a principi dai confini così ampi da essere estremamente labili” [When facing the immense range of problems and positions raised by adaptations, one easily realizes that some old issues have lost their urgency: to begin with, that of faithfulness. Fidelity reduces the interferences between texts, with all that matters on a theoretical and analytical level, to a comparison that oscillates between pure contrast (what is kept, what is left out, what is being modified) and references to principles so vast as to result unsteady] (Tinazzi 2007, 73). Nevertheless, Tinazzi’s categories of adaptation, which I list below, inevitably gravitate around the discrepancies between writing and film.

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female friend, but he needs to get rid of it, because he wants to return to Italy. With the complicity of a friend, he sets up a meeting with Liza, whom he thinks is going to take care of the dog. Instead, she only wishes to mate the dog with her mother’s dog. The two begin an affair that soon turns into an important and steady relationship: so much so, that Giorgio decides to stay on in the States, and they move into a secluded house in the residential suburb of Chappaqua, near the city. Here, the interdependencies that develop between them explode, taking the form of a weird dog/master relationship (with Liza substituting Melampo, who has, in the meantime, died, and Giorgio reluctantly accepting the change). This state of affairs continues until a car accident, after which Liza becomes her old self again, ends the relationship. A couple of years later, Flaiano finally convinced that no producers would ever accept his script, re-writes Melampo into a short novel, Melampus, which “non è una semplice traduzione letteraria di un soggetto scritto per il cinema, è il frutto di un ripensamento totale della materia,” [it is not simply a literary translation of an idea written for a film, but the result of a drastic rethinking of the subject matter] (Tassone 1978, 162) coloring it with a sort of bitter metadiscourse, about his own writer/film-writer condition. In fact, one of the first dissimilarities between the film and the book is the reason behind Giorgio’s trip, being Giorgio a rather open alter-ego of Flaiano. He is in America to write a film, and not just short stories, something that he actually tried to do. The novel is written in the form of a diary that Giorgio keeps “per segnarci tutto ciò che può interessare il film” [to jot down anything that could be of interest for the film] (Flaiano 1990, 737), although he will later disprove its preliminary intent of a diary “non intimo, filosofico e proditorio sul mio soggiorno” [about my stay, philosophical and treacherous in nature, but not intimate] (Flaiano 1990, 737) by writing exclusively on his personal life and incidents, though giving it a philosophical flavour. The first three chapters of Melampus are the prequel to what happens before the actual meeting, with which the original screenplay opens: a description of his struggle. First of all, his struggle against New York, which he wants to abandon barely a few weeks after his arrival, yet it keeps attracting him;7 then the struggle against the temptations presented by his secretary, Florence Baker, though 7

“Dopo un mese, all’idea di doversene andare prova un senso di fastidio. Quella città che egli credeva di poter controllare con la sua ironia è diventata un labirinto che non lo trattiene più, pieno di uscite e assolutamente incomprensibile” [After a month, the idea of leaving made him uncomfortable. The city, which he thought he could control with his irony, was transformed into a labyrinth that could no longer imprison him, full of exits and totally unintelligible] (Flaiano 1990, 756).

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absent in Melampo, here owner of the very dog that triggers the dangerous affair between Liza and himself. Eventually, Florence and Giorgio get involved in a relationship until, out of boredom, she marries an Englishman who cannot stand dogs: thus Giorgio becomes the new owner of the dog.8 Then, there is his struggle against the film producer, unwilling to finance a film whose plot is never disclosed in the text.9 Then, towards the end of chapter three, we are back where the script began: in the park, where the two dogs do not show any interest in each other. Liza and Giorgio decide to “try” indoors, where they end up doing what the dogs were supposed to do,10—in clear anticipation of the metamorphosis of human-being into dog, boosted by sexual attraction, that is at the centre of the story.11 From here onwards the novel, with some variations, reflects 8 “Mi tiene compagnia, alla meglio e senza nessuna convinzione, Melampus, ora diventato Melampo da quando Florence Baker me lo ha lasciato. L’inglese non lo gradiva, quale oscuro testimone di altri amori, e lei non amava abbastanza né l’inglese né il cane per imporre il secondo al primo” [Melampo, called Melampus since Florence Baker had left him to me, keeps me company as best as he can, unwillingly so. The Englishman did not like him, as he saw him as a witness of Florence’s others loves, and she did not love the Englishmen nor the dog enough to impose the latter on the former] (Flaiano 1990, 763). 9 “La risposta del produttore è stata negativa. La mia storia non apre spiragli a nessuna speranza. E invece il pubblico deve continuare a vivere” [The producer’s answer was negative. My story does not admit any hope. However, the audience needs to keep living] (Flaiano 1990, 759). 10 “Ha detto: ‘[i cani] non combineranno niente all’aperto.’ Guardava lontano, aspettando un soccorso improbabile. ‘Bisognerebbe forse tentare al chiuso.’ Ha guardato l’orologio, erano le nove e mezzo. Ci siamo svegliati alle due del pomeriggio, nel mio letto, perché i cani abbiavano” [She said: ‘the dogs won’t do anything here in the park.’ She was looking far away, waiting for an unlikely help. ‘Maybe, we should try indoor.’ She looked at the hour; it was half past nine a.m. We woke up in my bed at two p.m. because the dogs were barking] (Flaiano 1990, 772). 11 Hints of the same nature were presented even before. In a moral annotation Fabro writes: “Per la maschera l’odio è un’occasione soltanto, ma anche l’amore è un’occasione, anzi l’‘occasione’ che bisogna cogliere continuamente al volo. Quello che noi chiamiamo cinismo, cioè il comportamento del cane, è la sola filosofia accettabile delle maschere” [For the mask, hate is just a chance, and love too, better said ‘the chance’ that one should not let pass. What we called cynicism, the behavior of the dog, is the only suitable philosophy for the mask] (Flaiano 1990, 754). A little later, writing about Florence, he states that “come i cani da pastore, che sono fedeli al gregge e non al pastore, essa resta fedele al matrimonio, non al marito” [just as the shepard’s dog, that is faithful to the sheep and not to the shepherd, she is faithful to marriage, not to her husband] (Flaiano 1990, 755).

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the events narrated in the screenplay, with the same grim remarks made by Fabro, from the beginning described as “il simbolo dell’intellettuale ormai disilluso e inaridito, incapace di gradi slanci e ideali” [the symbol of the arid and deluded intellectual, unable to express any ideal or enthusiasm] (Sergiacomo 1996, 92).12 As his intellectual crisis progresses (he has difficulties in writing, and ultimately his stories are rejected by the publisher), Liza’s metamorphosis continues and the relationship grows stronger. The two develop a dependency on each other; an overwhelming and primitive reciprocal addiction, at least on the surface. More and more Liza shows the signs of her canine transformation,13 and Giorgio is both preoccupied (he will consult a friend-psychologist to “see” her) and

Florence is clearly a double, an alter-ego figure of Liza, as one can also see in Flaiano “Appunti per Melampo”: “Chi è Florence: 35 anni, forse 40. L’altro volto di Liza, la donna intellettuale. Intensa e un po’ distratta, elegante, gioca con la sua collana. Nervosa sotto un’apparenza calma. Ama Giorgio fisicamente. E lui le parla sempre di Liza!” [Who is Florence? She is 35, maybe 40. She is Liza’s other face, an intellectual. She is intense, a bit absent-minded, elegant, and plays with her necklace. Under a calm appearance, she is quite nervous. She loves Giorgio physically. And he keeps talking about Liza!] (Flaiano 1990, 889). 12 He often states his precarious situation: “I racconti che voglio scrivere languono: quelli già scritti soffrono […]. Manco di ideologie, forse. Non mi batto per nulla.” [The tales I want to write I cannot write, those already written, they suffer. (…) Perhaps, I lack an ideology. I do not fight for anything] (Flaiano 1990,763); “Il mio lavoro di tanti mesi è modesto, e va a raggiungere nel cassetto la storia del film che non si farà mai. Mi ci vorrà qualche giorno per leccarmi le ferite” [The work I have done in the last months is modest, and it adds up to the script that will never be transposed to film. It will take me a while to heal] (Flaiano 1990,834). In the second last chapter, Fabro overtly writes: “Scrivere? Ma se non capisco niente, se in un anno non sono riuscito a mettere in piedi una storia, se il mio guaio è proprio questo, l’assoluta aridità della mia fantasia, che a toccarla appena si lacera come un velo mangiato dalla polvere” [Writing? I don’t understand anything lately, in a whole year I was not even been able to begin a simple story; this is my problem, the absolute dryness of my fantasy, something that, once touched on, disappears as a coat of dust] (Flaiano 1990, 841). 13 Before the change takes place, in the first part of the novel, she makes a confession that heralds, at least, an association between the longing for a submissive animal status and love and caring. Speaking of a solitary, sad vacation in France she mentions: “Non ero mai stata così sola. Tra le pietre dell’abbazia di Cluny spuntavano dei fiori rossi. Di colpo desiderai di essere un cane, per avere una carezza da quelli che sedevano ai tavoli”[I had never felt so alone. In Cluny, among the stones, red flowers were blooming. Suddenly, I wished I were a dog, so as to be stroked by the people seated at the tables] (Flaiano 1990, 778).

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aroused (apart for the very first encounter, the only sexual scenes that are reported in the diary occur during her “dog phase”).14 “Melampus,” synthesizes Sergiacomo, “è costruito su un impianto essenzialmente psicologico” [is built upon a structure which is essentially psychological] (Sergiacomo 1996, 92), where the protagonist’s speculations are filled with quotations and high-brow references. At one moment, Giorgio, recalling the meeting with the producer, writes that he “spera sempre nell’italian touch che faccia ridere […], io invece la vedo come una serie di piccole tragedie coscienziose e sgradevoli” [he always hopes for the ‘italian touch’ that makes people laugh […], I, on the contrary, see it as a sequence of little conscious and unpleasant little tragedies] (Flaiano 1990, 753), thus giving, by doing so, a brilliant definition of Melampus’s style as a whole: a series of annotations, at times trite, banal and almost written para-tactically, more often than not cloaked in a metaphorical, pseudo-philosophical speculative manner; the two “registers” frequently intertwined.15 The display of cultural references grows enormously between the screenplay and the novel, as if Flaiano wanted to upgrade his writing to the new status of “high art”, stressing the passage from cinema to literature. In Melampo, only one direct quote from 14 In fact, after Liza becomes normal again, towards the end of the novel, she is ashamed by his approaches: “È andata a uno specchio, poi è passata davanti a me un paio di volte, per farsi ammirare. Sorrideva, vedendola così ben disposta, amichevole, l’ho afferrata per una mano e l’ho costretta a sedere accanto a me. La parrucca le è andata un po’ di traverso. Per un lampo ho creduto di capire che era ancora mia, e che desiderava esserlo. ‘Stai con me’, le ho detto, ‘è possibile?’ E lei: ‘Sì’. Ma dopo un po’ già si guardava attorno, a disagio, come se avesse altre cose più importanti da sbrigare e io le stessi facendo perdere tempo. Era impacciata” [She looked at the mirror, and then she passed twice in front of me, so I could behold her. She was smiling, hence seeing her so happy and friendly, I grabbed her and forced her to sit beside me. Her wig moved gracelessly. For a while I thought she was still mine, and that she wanted to be mine. ‘Stay with me’ I told her ‘will you?’ She said: ‘Yes’. However, she soon began to look around nervously, as if she had something more important to do, as if she were wasting time. She was uncomfortable] (Flaiano 1990, 835). 15 See for example: “Viaggiare è come tenere i rubinetti aperti e vedere il tempo che va via, sprecato, liquido, intrattenibile. In lotta con la mia ansia di andarmene (ho telefonato due volte a Florence Baker senza trovarla), raggiungo le strade del vecchio quartiere centrale, abbastanza dense e con la vecchia minaccia degli sguardi sospesi per aria” [Traveling is like keeping the water-taps running, watching time flow away, wasted, liquid time, unstoppable. I am struggling with my urge for flight (I called Florence Baker twice and she was not home), I reached the old central neighborhood’s dense streets; I am surrounded by the usual menace of invisible gazes] (Flaiano 1990, 758).

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a classic can be found, one which is rather functional to the plot. It is, in fact, hidden—Giorgio quotes only a verse not revealing the author’s name—to emphasize Liza’s lesser cultural level,16 and it includes a canine implication as well: it is a verse from “La casada infiel”, a poem by Lorca included in his Romancero Gitano: “un horizonte de perros.”17 The novel contains a small anthology of quotes, and outlines a rather rich Pléiade of authors (explicitly named or concealed)18 that clashes with the “realism”

16 Even previously, Liza showed ignorance of literary chronology: “LIZA: ‘Melampo è il nome di un cane in Lolita.’—GIORGIO: ‘Melampo è in Pinocchio. È un cane subdolo.’” (Flaiano 1978, 7) [LIZA: ‘Melampo is a dog’s name in Lolita.’—GIORGIO: ‘Melampo is to be found in Pinocchio. He is a sly dog’]; “‘Melampus è il nome di un cane in Lolita, un romanzo’ ha detto Liza Baldwin. Ho corretto: “Melampo è anche in Pinocchio. Era un cane subdolo. Si metteva d’accordo con le faine e le lasciava entrare nel pollaio. Ma il suo padrone non poteva immaginarlo e quando Melampo morì, lo rimpiangeva’” [‘Melampus is the name of a dog in Lolita, a novel’ Liza Baldwin said. I corrected her: ‘Melampo is in Pinocchio, too. He was a sly dog. He made a pact with the beech-martens, and let them enter the hen-house. His master did not know, though, and when the dog dies, he cries over him’] (Flaiano 1990, 768—769). The first historical Melampo is described by Flaiano in his “Appunti su Melampo,” published after his death. The description is kept, with only minor changes in the novel: “Melampo, ȂȑȜĮȝʌȠȢ, un mitico veggente greco, che aveva il dono di comprendere la voce degli animali. Le figlie di Preto si erano opposte al culto dionisiaco e quindi punite con la pazzia: egli le risanò” [Melampo, ȂȑȜĮȝʌȠȢ, was a mythical Greek soothsayer who could understand animal’s tongues. Preto’s daughters went against the Dionysian cult, and therefore were punished and became mad. Melampo healed them] (Flaiano 1990, 884—885). Nevertheless, Flaiano makes no references to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where Melampus, a dog of Spartan origins, along with other mythological dogs, kills his master Acteon, who had been previously transformed into a deer by an enraged Diana. It is probably from Ovid that Nabokov took his Jean Farlow character dog’s name in Lolita. 17 “Si sentono dei cani abbaiare alla luna, lontano. Giorgio ascolta, poi, se stesso. GIORGIO: ‘Un orizzonte di cani…’ e poi?—LIZA: Che cos’è?—GIORGIO: Niente. Un verso. Di un poeta assassinato.—LIZA: Senti molto la mancanza di Melampo, rientrando?—GIORGIO (sorpreso): No…” [In the distance, one could hear dogs barking at the moon. Giorgio then listens to himself. GIORGIO: ‘a dog horizon…’ and then?—LIZA: What is it?—GIORGIO: Nothing. It is a verse of a murdered poet.—LIZA: Do you miss Melampo very much, when you get home? —GIORGIO (surprised): No…] (Flaiano 1978, 16). Interestingly enough, the poem is about a love encounter between a gitano [gypsy] and an unfaithful wife. 18 Among them, the most notable are: Da Ponte (755), Chekhov (763), Valéry (767), Ginsberg, Malamud, Robbe-Grillet and Le Clezio (769), Montale (775), Artaud and Kafka (785), Beckett (808), Proust (828), Poe (839), Pirandello (842).

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that Flaiano, according to Sergiacomo, reaches by accumulating “vicende sfrangiate, casuali, ambigue, interrotte, senza plausibile conclusione […], come avviene nella vita reale” [frayed, random, ambiguous, interrupted vicissitudes, (…) as they happen in real life] (92). Something that fully pertains, on the contrary, to the “diary” genre. Melampus is thus a novel of (fictional) facts filtered by a blatantly intellectual mind in crisis, driven by the writer’s indulgent look at his own failure.19 Even the very essential occurrence of the story, the transformation, remains ambiguously trapped in Giorgio’s speculations, so much so, that this compulsive idea of Liza transformed into a “bitch” might be read, exclusively, as a product of Giorgio’s obsession.20 Nobody seems to corroborate his idea. Not his friend Gerald, the psychologist, who at first declares that Liza “non ha bisogno di cure, è soltanto una donna innamorata, di buon senso” [does not need a cure, she is simply a sensible woman in love] (Flaiano 1990, 831) and that later adds “per me Liza è un’attrice […], un’attrice con un solo spettatore. Te. E ci caschi sempre” [to me, Liza is an actress, […] an actress with just one spectator. You. And you keep falling for it] (Flaiano 1990, 841). Neither Liza, with her unexpected answer to a provocative and straightforward question from Giorgio: “IO: Può succedere a tutti di cambiare, di sentirsi un’altra cosa. Io da bambino volevo diventare un cavallo. Correre, avere una criniera. E tu? —LIZA: Niente—IO: Ti è sempre piaciuto essere Liza? Mai una sirena, una tigre, un…?—LIZA: Un albero.—IO: Ecco, vedi: un albero…” [I: The novel ends with a quote from an unnamed biography on Goethe that reports a dialogue between the German poet and Napoleon. 19 For instance, when he discovers that the publisher has rejected his book, he writes: “Ho incassato il colpo quasi con gioia: il rifiuto è stato un pugno al mio orgoglio e per tutta la mattinata ho creduto di esserne fuori, di poter rimediare in qualche modo, di proporre arditamente il libro ad altri, di valermi anzi del rifiuto di Kampf per credere alla bontà di quello che ho scritto. Verso sera, ero già convinto del contrario” [I took it almost happily: my pride was torn to shreds by the rejection of the book. All morning long, I thought I was over it, that I could fix the situation, send the manuscript to another publisher. I even though that Kampf’s rejection was proof of the quality of my writing. At sunset, I was already convinced that this was not the case] (Flaiano 1990, 833). 20 “Se non riesco nemmeno più a leggere, e del Roget’s Thesaurus ho controllato appena i sinonimi e i gergali della voce Dog. Eccoli: canine, cur, whelp, puppy, pup, tyke, bitch slut, pooch, mutt!” [I do not even read anymore, the only thing I have looked up in Roget’s Thesaurus are synonyms and slang expressions under the Dog entry. Here they are: canine, cur, whelp, puppy, pup, tyke, bitch slut, pooch, mutt!] (Flaiano 1990, 841).

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Anyone can feel the need to change, the desire to be something else. When I was a child I wished I were a horse, just to be able to run faster, to have a mane. And you?—LIZA: Nothing.—I: Did you always want to be Liza? You never wished you were a tiger, a…?—LIZA: A tree. I: You see, a tree…] (Flaiano 1990, 821). The tale is mostly a psychological rumination of Giorgio about a relationship that becomes more and more suffocating and dependency-driven, enlightening one of the prominent concerns of Flaiano’s entire oeuvre: “la ricerca di uno spazio chiuso, in cui l’esperienza della frontiera venga condotta alle estreme conseguenze” [the search for a closed space, where the experience of the border could reach its extreme consequences] (Venturelli 1982, 65). In Melampus, this coincides with the isolated cottage of Chappaqua: “‘ormai viviamo a letto’ scrive al culmine della sua esperienza con la ragazza […]. È questo il momento di massima chiusura spaziale, e corrisponde al punto massimo della metamorfosi di Liza” [‘at this point, we live in bed’ he writes at the peak of his sentimental involvement with the girl (…) That is when they reach the most complete spatial proximity, that overlaps with Liza’s full metamorphosis] (Venturelli 1982, 65). Thus, for Flaiano, the story is mainly about “la difficoltà dei rapporti, la necessità di renderli più semplici, naturali, animali. […], la degradazione accettata, e anzi inventata da Liza come fuga da una realtà che l’intelligenza non riesce più a dominare—e che l’istinto può rendere abitabile” [the difficulty of relationships, the need of making them simpler, more basic (…), the accepted, or better invented, Liza’s degradation, seen as a flight from a reality that the intellect can no longer dominate, and only instincts can render acceptable] (Flaiano 1990, 889) as the writer himself notes down in his “Appunti su Melampo,” putting all his efforts into portraying a man who “non crede troppo alla vita, alla società, al mondo, e cerca un rifugio […], crede di averlo trovato prima nella letteratura […] poi si accorge che la sua destinazione è Liza” [does not fully believe in life, society, the world, and who is looking for refuge, (…) a refuge that, at first, he believes to have found in literature, until he realizes that Liza is his true destination] (Flaiano 1990, 887). There persists in Flaiano’s book, to sum up, the idea of a possible way out of the general crisis of the bourgeoisie— no matter how sour and fleeting this might be. The two endings are, in this sense, symptomatic. In the script, after Liza momentarily comes back as a dog (she runs after the stick Giorgio has just threw and then they furiously embrace), Flaiano makes sure, by writing a coda, that people would not make the wrong assumption: “Ma non è un lieto fine. Forse, un ritorno alla situazione iniziale, al serpente che si morde la coda, al circolo chiuso. Cane e padrone che si ritrovano, sono un po’ disperati” [It is not a happy

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ending. Maybe, it is a “come back” to the original situation, like the snake that bites its tail, it’s a vicious circle. Like master and dog who meet again, slightly desperate] (Flaiano 1978, 126). The need to clarify reveals the weakness of such a closure as well as the moderate tone of the “parable”— they are in fact “slightly” desperate. Even more judicious is the conclusion of the novel: the couple is back together again (and apparently she has regained her dog status).21 The final lines read “per quanto continui a sembrarmi strano, si avverte qualcosa che ricorda il regolare corso della felicità in attesa della partenza” [no matter how strange it may seem, I can sense something that recalls the regular flow of happiness, before it departs] (Flaiano 1990, 851). “Con Flaiano non avrei mai potuto andare d’accordo, per lui il cinema e la letteratura erano troppo sacri” [I could have never agreed with Flaiano on anything, for him literature and cinema were too sacred] (Ferreri 1991, 34). This is how Ferreri has candidly synthesized his experience when filming Melampus, something that “avendo avuto la buona volontà di cominciare con il libro […], è stato cambiato moltissimo” [although started with the good intention of following the book (…), it has changed drastically] (Ferreri 1991, 34). The translation of such an incompatibility of visions results in a film that blatantly overturns the idea of Melampus, which is still a “ibrido fra la struttura in tre atti classica e una sorta di viaggio dell’eroe all’amatriciana” [hybrid between the classic three-act structure and a grotesque journey of the hero] and fundamentally “una storia d’amore” [a love story] (Natalini 2002). Contrary to Flaiano’s depiction of the melancholic intellectual, judging of other social classes and, by doing so, pretending to have a function,22 Ferreri’s intention is to 21

“Talvolta, per sentire la mia voce, le parlo di ciò che sto leggendo, lei ascolta con un occhio aperto e allarmato, ma senza abbaiare” [Sometimes, I talk to her about what I am reading, just to hear my own voice. She listens with one eye open and alert but she does not bark] (Flaiano 1990, 850). 22 “Al mio tavolo niente di eccezionale: piccoli impiegati, commesse, ragazze che sperano anche in un rapido matrimonio, giovani astuti che debbono cogliere l’occasione, il ceto medio mi rattrista perché crede solo nei risultati” [At my table, there is nothing extraordinary. Little employees, clerks, girls who desire a fast marriage, sly young people ready to grab at any opportunity. The middle-class saddens me because it only believes in outcomes] (Flaiano 1990, 748). “Lontano da questa società irrimediabilmente middle-class, formalista e piena di cani altrettanto formalisti” [To go far away from this inflexible middle-class society, so formalistic and full of formalistic dogs] (Flaiano 1990, 803). “I suoi giovani invitati sono belli, escono dalle università di famiglia, intelligenti per censo (conoscono l’esatto valore della vita), ammorbiditi da un’esistenza di bagni, di aria aperta, di sport costosi, di vacanze inaccessibili. […] Considerano l’intelligenza

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show the absolute futility of the intellectual (and the couple) to participate in any collective change (that necessarily begins from individual or couple): “l’unico modo per attaccare le strutture è la rivoluzione e l’intellettuale è fuori da questa prospettiva” [the only way to attack structures is by mean of a revolution, and the intellectual is left out this perspective] (Ferreri 1980, 9). The kind of intellectual here described by Ferreri, might easily have been Giorgio’s character, so that the quest in LC is, primarily, to show his total lack of capacity and will. With LC one could speak, loosely using Genette’s terminology, of a hyper-text23 of the “devaluation” type, which is basically the “confutation” of the original spirit of the source, a sort of “demystification.”24 Most of what was in Melampus is reversed or distorted here, not as if it was a parody,25 but rather grotesquely flattened, manipulated to represent “il momento critico delle soluzioni utopiche, la frustrazione della signoria dell’intelletto e la fine delle gratificazioni aberranti dell’arte, nella dissoluzione dello pseudo-valore della figura e del ruolo dell’intellettuale” [the critical joint of the utopian solutions, the upsetting of the sovereignty of intelligence, and the end of the aberrant gratification of art, with the final disbanding of the pseudo-value of the figure and role of intellectuals] (Grande 1980, 150). una qualità inferiore, quando non è applicata freddamente al potere e alla vita” [Her young guests are beautiful, educated at the same colleges as their parents, they are clever (since they know the exact value of life), softened by a life-style made up of beaches, expensive sports and top-class vacations. (…) They think intelligence is a lower quality, when it is not coldly employed for power games and life] (Flaiano 1990, 835—836). 23 “Chiamo dunque ipertesto qualsiasi testo derivato da un testo anteriore tramite una trasformazione semplice […] o tramite una trasformazione indiretta, che diremo imitazione” [I call hyper-text any text that is derived from a preceding text, throughout a simple transformation, or an indirect one, that we could call imitation] (Genette 1997, 10). Needless to say, Genette in his book only speaks about “palimpsest” of written texts, and does not include passages from one medium to another. 24 “Il meccanismo [...] può anche venire applicato a un ipotesto esso stesso devalorizzante, o che poco si cura di valorizzare la storia che racconta e i suoi protagonisti.” [This process could be applied to a hypo-text which is devaluated in his own right, or that at least does not care to validate the story is telling] (Genette 1997, 421). 25 Genette gives different definitions of parody, but its primary characteristic is a “certo atteggiamento canzonatorio nei confronti dell’epopea” [certain mocking attitude towards the epopee] (Genette 1997, 15), an attitude which is absent in Ferreri’s work.

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The primary change is thus a stylistic one. The novelist, as mentioned before, creates an entertaining mixture of styles, passing from the purely narrative form of events to their commentary, including “lunghe considerazioni che Flaiano ‘presta’ a Giorgio Fabro sul teatro” [extended opinions on theatre that Flaiano ‘lends’ to Giorgio Fabro] and “la sua visione della società americana,” [his reading of the American society] (Sergiacomo 1996, 93) pieces of dialogues, parts recounted in the third person (whereas in the rest of the novel, he sticks with the first person),26 he even touches on poetry.27 This sort of pastiche probably intends to simulate the “natural discharge” and the “inelegance” Fabro compares, in the middle of the novel, to his preferred literary style: Un racconto dove domina l’irrazionale e il fantastico chiede uno stile piano. Vedi Poe e Kafka. La diseleganza come unica eleganza accettabile. Scritto male e in fretta, esattamente come si scrive il biglietto alla donna delle pulizie, o la lettera nel buffet della stazione. Questo e non altro è lo stile, una secrezione naturale (Flaiano 1990, 808). A tale in which irrationality and fantasy dominate, calls for a plain style. As in Poe and Kafka. Inelegance as the only possible elegance. Something badly written, exactly as one would write a note for the maid, or a letter in a bar at train station. This and only this is style, a natural secretion.

Despite this programmatic statement (partially present in the “Appunti”),28 Flaiano’s text is far from being “flat”, although it is, perhaps, “inelegant.” The novel is, on the contrary, a rather layered and complex construction. The entertaining presence of multiple genres in Melampus and the search for spontaneity, elements which tend to create a closeness to the reader, are altered, by Ferreri, into a cold cinematography, essentially composed of medium to long shots so as to distance the public from the action, and insistent, anti-climatic close-ups, rarely directed to 26

Here, for example, where he gives a description of the character’s feelings, almost like a report: “La noia di Fabro non viene dalla sazietà delle cose, ma dal sentimento della loro inutilità. Non prova nemmeno più emozioni morali: tutto è stato detto” [Fabro’s boredom does not grow out of things’ fullness; inversely, it springs out of their uselessness. He does not even feel moral emotions, as everything has been already said] (Flaiano 1990, 812). 27 See Flaiano 1990, 836—837, where he writes about memory and affection using what might be called free verses. 28 “La diseleganza!—come unica eleganza accettabile. Scritto male apposta” [Inelegance!—As the only possible elegance. Something badly written on purpose] (Flaiano 1990, 885).

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express pathos or key lines, rather inserted to represent silences.29 Almost the whole film is practically shot outdoors with overexposed photography that “blurs” the characters, whose contours are at times evanescent in order to stress their volatility. Even the actors’ performances seem to fluctuate purposefully between carelessness (the initial sequence on the boat) and exaggeration (the battering of Liza): actors are agent of this “pseudodocumentary”—shot with all the detachment a documentary requires— 30 where everybody is faking something. Giorgio pretends to be a nouvelle Robinson and he is not,31 Liza acts as a bitch, Giorgio’s wife (apparently) fakes a suicide, and even one of Liza’s friends annoyingly mouths a trumpet solo for an entire minute. Beyond the formal aspects, Ferreri’s aversion to Flaiano’s development of the brilliant idea of the “transformation” is evident in the myriad of changes in the plot. The director radically modifies the setting of the novel. He actually overturns it: instead of one of the biggest metropolis in the world, he chooses an apparently deserted island, giving from the outset a solipsist and “uncivilized” tone to the story.32 However, 29

“[…] L’eccesso del primo piano si autosopprime come significante e suggestione semantica, cancellando ed eludendo, nel contempo, i ‘referenti iconici’ e psicologici delle figure e dei personaggi fin troppo corrosi dal loro insistito apparire in primo piano” [The excessive use of close-ups destroys its own semantic and significant expression. It erases and eludes, at the same time, all the ‘iconic’ referents and psychologies of the characters; characters that are thus consumed by their insistence on appearing in close-ups] (Grande 1980, 162). 30 “La macchina da presa è usata da subito con estrema razionalità. I movimenti sono limitati, lo sguardo il più possibile oggettivo” [From the beginning, the camera is used with extreme rationality. Movements are limited, and the gaze is as objective as possible] (Brunetta 1993, 231). 31 In one of their first encounters, Giorgio and Liza play about Defoe’s character: “Io mi chiamo Liza e non sono un’idiota!”—“Io sono Robinson Crusoe.”—“E se io fossi Venerdì?” [I am Liza and I am not an idiot!—I am Robinson Crusoe.— And what if I were Girl Friday?] 32 In the script, Flaiano mentions the “possibility” of the island twice: “LIZA (pausa): Se noi due vivessimo su un albero, per esempio, saremmo più felici?— GIORGIO: No, saremmo uccelli. O scoiattoli. Dipende.—LIZA: E in un’isola deserta?—GIORGIO: Naufraghi…” [LIZA (pause): If we lived in a tree, for example, would we not be happier?—GIORGIO: No, we would be like birds or squirrels. It depends.—LIZA: and what about on a desert island?—GIORGIO: Survivors…] (Flaiano 1978, 17). “LIZA: Che discorsi! Il mondo è largo. Se qui non va bene, andiamocene.—GIORGIO (spazientito): Con te? E dove?—LIZA: Dove, dove, dove! In Africa, in un’isola, in una foresta, in un deserto, a Capri! Liberi, soli” [LIZA: Silly words! The world is huge. If we do not like it here, let us go elsewhere.—GIORGIO (restless): With you? Where?—LIZA: Where, where,

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it is neither Crusoe’s island nor a wild one: the very beginning of the film shows the island from a birds-eye view, with a pleasant piece of orchestra music in the background, as if it were a presentation clip for tourists. The first few minutes are in fact a series of cinematographic “postcards” of the sea and atolls (situated between Sardinia and Corsica), an extremely remote landscape, far removed, in every way, from the all-absorbing New York of Melampus. Then, Liza abandons a private cruise after a fight with her man, a fight Ferreri does not show and the motive of which is never revealed. In a scene that is but a degraded replica of Antonioni’s L’avventura—the côté being quite similar: rich couples cruising bored and almost unwilling33—Liza dives into the water and reaches the island where Giorgio and his dog, Melampo, are hidden, watching the scene. Giorgio is presented as the typical survivor on the uninhabited island. As one becomes immersed in the film though, Giorgio condition of self-reclusion is defined in all its contradiction and phony rebellions against the system.34 He keeps working on a comic-strip about Spartacus, the Roman rebel slave: Ferreri disintegrates Flaiano’s high concept of the tormented writer and degrades Giorgio to a “fumettaro” [comic-strip writer] who is writing a story of social rebellion, while in isolation. Ferreri adds a satirical tone and an actualization to his present time of social changes:35 Spartacus is, in fact, portrayed with his black counterparts, the “black panthers” and is not simply evoked as an historical character, but rather as an example of revolutionary man, the revolution Giorgio might only dream as he is the clearest example of social disengagement possible.36 Liza’s character where! Africa, a desert island, a forest, a desert, Capri! We will be free, and by ourselves] (Flaiano 1978, 43). In the novel “islands” are never mentioned. 33 “Difficile non pensare—con questo paesaggio roccioso e Liza che si nasconde alla ricerca degli amici—all’Avventura di Antonioni, uno dei registi preferiti di Ferreri” [A rocky landscape, Liza who hides while her friends are looking for her—it is not hard to think back to L’avventura by Antonioni, one of Ferreri’s favorite directors] (Masoni 1998, 60). 34 “Tutto attorno a lui è fasullo, i legami con il mondo non sono stati spezzati a sufficienza, né era possibile farlo. La radio, il motoscafo, i cibi in scatola, tutto ci avverte che Giorgio sta simulando” [Everything that surrounds him is false. Connections with the outside world are not fully interrupted, because it was impossible to do so. Radio, motor-boat, canned food, everything discloses that Giorgio is a fake] (Accialini and Coluccelli 1979, 99). 35 Later in the film, when Liza reaches Giorgio at his Paris apartment, the family watches some post-1968 demonstrations on TV. 36 In a later scene, Giorgio and Liza are fishing from a boat, and he tells her the story about the battle between Spartacus and Crassus, underlining how Spartacus was not a rebel, but a revolutionary with class conscience, so much so that “Carlo

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maintains some of her predecessor’s characteristics, she is “elegante, svagata, […] ricca, con un buon indirizzo, certamente educata […], ha sempre ceduto alla moda, alla società […], ha viaggiato, ha conosciuto gente, avuto amanti” [stylish, absent-minded, (…) wealthy, with a nice house, evidently well educated, (…) someone who yields to fashion, to society (…), who has traveled plentifully, met lots of people and had many lovers] (Flaiano 1990, 834). Nevertheless, she is much bolder: not only does she leave her friends abruptly, but she also kills the dog in order to become a substitute for Giorgio’s fondness and interest.37 What was merely a hint of the rivalry between Liza and Melampo in the novel explodes in Ferreri.38 For Flaiano it was the dog that learned from its master: “io e Melampus ci eravamo capiti e credo che lui apprezzasse in me la calma che imprimevo alla nostra vita comune” [Melampus and I understood each other, and I believe he loved the quiet life I lived and made him live], so much so that “negli ultimi tempi, nel tentativo di imitarmi, era diventato molto pigro e vagliava le mie proposte di una passeggiata pensandoci sopra” [lately, as if he wished to imitate me, he became particularly lazy and carefully evaluated my invitations for a walk] Marx stesso ha detto che Spartaco è stato l’unico vero rappresentante del proletariato dell’antichità” [Karl Marx himself, said that Spartacus had been the only true proletarian leader of ancient times], as Giorgio declares to a distracted Liza. 37 Jean Claude Carrière said about the LC screenplay: “mi pare che [Ferreri] abbia inteso realizzare una specie di favola mitologica non lontana da una certa tradizione greco-classica” [I think Ferreri wanted to make a sort of mythological fable, not far removed from a specific classic Greek tradition] (Tassone 1978, 161). This “classic” dimension of Ferreri’s treatment reverberates in the actual dangerousness of the woman-dog: in Greek mythology women were often compared to dogs, on the one hand for their faithfulness and devotion, on the other hand for their potential threat to the status quo. See Franco, Cristiana. 2003. Senza ritegno. Il cane e la donna nell'immaginario della Grecia antica. Bologna: Il Mulino. Furthermore, the choice of the woman-dog metamorphosis comes as no surprise if one looks at Ferreri’s filmography. Films such as L’ape regina (a metaphorical transformation) and La donna scimmia (a much more actual degradation and mutation) speak of the director’s strong interest in the connection between femininity and the distorted perception of women as animals. 38 “Liza Baldwin non […] aveva completamente accettato [Melampo], sentendosi forse esclusa dal nostro semplice rapporto di vecchi amici che non si danno reciproco fastidio e amano anzi ognuno dell’altro più i difetti che le virtù” [Liza Baldwin (…) never really accepted Melampo, perhaps because she felt excluded from our relationship, one between two old friends who do not bother each other, and who even appreciate each another’s flaws better than their good qualities] (Flaiano 1990, 791).

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(Flaiano 1990, 791). The film reveals the exact opposite attitude; grotesquely, it is the dog that leads the man. In a long shot, before an astonished Liza, Giorgio is seen blind-folded walking on dangerous rocks, guided by Melampo, thus producing an allegory of his lack of independence. Even the narrative coup de théâtre of the metamorphosis develops very differently: whereas Flaiano’s Liza suffers a slow psychological regression into a dog,39 Ferreri’s confesses to her murder and accepts her destiny without hesitation: once he discovers the truth, Giorgio repeatedly tosses a stick into the sea, until Liza can no longer bear the exhaustion of fetching it to her master. Whereas the transformation, as troubled as it was, in Melampus, was a way of connection between two “lost” people, in LC the relationship is manifestly depicted, from the very first moment, in all its sado-masochistic intensity. For Ferreri, it is both urgent and essential to describe the self-destructive side of his characters and that of mankind in general. On a psychological level, if Flaiano writes about a “regression” of the formal type, where the individual retreats into “modi di espressione e di comportamento di un livello inferiore dal punto di vista della complessità, della strutturazione e della differenziazione” [more primitive forms of expression and behavior, on the level of complexity, structuralization and differentiation] (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973, 498), Ferreri films a sado-maschistic relationship that “nell’atto stesso in cui si combina con la libido la pulsione di morte si scinde in sadismo e masochismo erogeni”40 [mingles with the death drive, whenever it splits into erotic sadism and masochism] (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973, 529). As in many of Ferreri’s films, LC is about impotence, denial and, ultimately, death. All the occurrences that constitute Flaiano’s development of the story are negated by Ferreri: no more friendly psychologists to help understand the situation, no more demonstration of 39

The fact that Flaiano drops various hints to associate the dog and the woman before the actual transformation, speaks clearly of a sluggish metamorphosis. In Ferreri there is only a hint about what Liza will do to the poor dog. When the two first meet, she shouts at Melampo, who is barking at her, “se non vai via ti mordo!” [if you don’t go away, I am gonna bite you!]. 40 Interestingly, in one of the most intense scenes of Pasolini’s Salò (1975)—the quintessential film about sadism—the prisoners are forced to act like dogs, barking and begging for food that is thrown at them. It is also worth mentioning that Lina Wertmüller’s Travolti da un insolito destino nell'azzurro mare d'agosto (1974), recalls the premises of LC, being about two strangers who get involved in a sadomasochistic relationship on a desert island. More recently, the Polish storyboard artist Kasia Adamik in her only film as a director, Bark! (2002), focused her attention on the psychological transformation of a woman who acts like a dog.

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the tender qualities of the she-dog,41 no more “best-in-show” events where Liza humiliates masters and dogs around her. Not even the self assurance of the writer, distressed but firm in his judgments: in a pivotal scene, for instance, Giorgio confronts his son (who is on the island to ask him if he is also leaving for Paris, to see his mother who had just attempted suicide) who asks “in questa specie di pantheon, che ci fai qui? […] Ma chi credi di essere, un selvaggio? Un naufrago?” [what are you doing in this sort of Pantheon! Who do you think you are? A savage? A survivor?] He replies, after having reached for Liza, who seems unable to speak and utters only inarticulate sounds, “io faccio quello che voglio.” [I’ll do whatever I want] To which the son answers back “e cos’è che vuoi?,” [and what is it that you want?] leaving him completely confounded and speechless.42 There is only one episode of Melampus that is retained by Ferreri, although it has been completely changed in the filmic version. At one moment in the script, Liza disappears, while having a picnic in the woods with Giorgio. After a long search, Giorgio finds her with some hunters and their dogs, partying around a barbecue with sandwiches and beer. When Giorgio calls her she goes back to him, saying goodbye to her “new friends.” In the novel, this “escapade,” which deposits proof of Liza’s potential infidelity into action, occurs in a likely fashion, although this time she runs away and play with the six dogs only, no men are involved. Giorgio’s jealousy does not seem to be the focus for Ferreri. In fact, hunters and dogs are substituted for a company of legionnaires on the island to capture and kill a deserter. That night, a horrified Liza spies on the soldiers who are beating the runaway up, but the very next morning, she accepts a biscuit from their general, until Giorgio comes and drags her away. In LC the hunters (civilians who play with guns) are replaced by the 41

See for example the episode where she waits for Giorgio all night, sleeping in a car, while he is at his lover’s home: “Dentro [la macchina] c’era Liza che dormiva arrotolata in un plaid. Ho aperto lo sportello. Si è svegliata di colpo, sorridendo, come se tutto fosse normale. ‘Che fai qui?’ le ho chiesto. E lei: ‘Ti aspettavo’. Non sono riuscito a dominare l’emozione, povera e ritrovata Liza Baldwin, l’ho baciata sulla fronte, sugli occhi, sulle labbra. Ed eccomi daccapo” [Liza was inside the car, sleeping covered by a blanket. I opened the door. She abruptly woke up, smiling, as if everything was normal. ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked her. ‘I was waiting for you’ she replied. I could not dominate my emotions, my poor and beloved Liza Baldwin. I kissed her on her forehead, eyes and lips. I am starting all over] (Flaiano 1990, 806). 42 Giorgio’s bewilderment is well expressed by two sequences in which he looks at a mirror: the first one, in his hut/bunker on the island, while he tries to sketch a self-portrait; the second back in Paris, in the bedroom with his wife, when he stares at his face repeatedly, caressing his beard.

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real state military force: death on the island comes first via the representation of Power at its purest (as well as in its most brutal incarnation, the Foreign Legion), and Liza’s flirting with it unmasks the double nature of people divided between loyalty and freedom, idealism and opportunism. In a film which is the representation of the “negazione della società organizzata e delle istituzioni” [negation of organized society and its institutions] (Grande 1980, 153) and the immanent failure of that negation, the two big events are Giorgio’s momentary come back to Paris, and the ending. While on a visit to his convalescent wife, Giorgio and his family are having dinner (his skinny daughter is on a strict diet, something that shows her submission towards the new consumerist society’s obsession) and Liza interrupts the occasion. Contrary to expectations, the wife welcomes Liza into their house, and instead of rebelling, performs an act of degradation and conformism: she mimics the new, aberrant relationship of the husband, and offers herself sexually to Giorgio, “doggie style.” Inevitably, he refuses.43 As is always the case, the ending of the film is revelatory of the entire enterprise, and the differences between writing and filming supports the idea of a complete overturning of the source. Symptomatically, the scene that closed the screenplay, and then “almost” closes the novel—Liza running into the water to fetch the stick for Giorgio—is used by Ferreri as the true “beginning” of the story: the moment of the metamorphosis. In LC, however, the last minutes are dedicated to the couple’s physical “decadence” and final defeat. In Melampus, the last description is about daily-life routine and calm rituals: the ending is placid, almost idyllic, with wonderful sunsets, moonlight and breezes, a comforting evening on the balcony and quite dinners.44 In the film, the couple is no longer able to 43

During the Paris parenthesis, Giorgio and a friend take a walk and then go for a drink together. Ferreri is thus enabled to show two more feeble “flights” from society: heavy drinking—his friend is an alcoholic—and religious association, when a group of Hare Krishna, questioned by Giorgio, tells the two what true happiness is. 44 “In queste prime sere di settembre vado volentieri sulla veranda e vedo scendere il sole oltre la collina dirimpetto. Man mano la luce si fa elusiva, le ombre salgono a unire il prato con la siepe e, nel chiarore celeste d’occidente, Venere si allontana ogni sera un poco; e a oriente, più tardi, l’ultimo quarto di luna stenta a levarsi. […] Una rugiada scende a placare i sensi […]. Liza […] mi precede in cucina e siede attenta e placata mentre io preparo la cena. La consumiamo in silenzio” [It is the beginning of September, at dusk I love to seat upon my patio and watch the sun as it goes down and disappears behind the hill in front of my house. As the light fades, shadows emerge and darken the lawn and the hedge. Every night, Venus slowly moves away; to the east, later on, the last quarter of the moon struggles to

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reach the closest, inhabited island, because their boat is lost at sea. The weather turns menacing, with strong winds and rain: they are starving, as they refuse to eat roots, they choose to consume instead the only remaining tinned food they have left, ultimate proof of their inability to adapt to a fully natural and wild way of life. Guided by the instincts of hunger, they decide to leave the island by means of an old and broken down plane abandoned decades earlier (it is probably a relic of the war as it has a swastika painted on its wings). But it is clearly a mise en scène they play, underlined by the lack of destination (just a place where one can eat!) and the bizarre idea of not only repairing the plane, but painting it also. So when they are aboard this unstable pink plane, all dressed up as if they were going to a party, “il mascheramento come controparte fenomenologica e rituale della negazione utopica” [the act of dressing up as phenomenological and ritual counterpart of the utopist negation] (Grande 1980, 161) fully disclose their inner helplessness. No more words, the music that opens the film comes back and covers the other sounds, so one cannot hear neither the engine, which probably does not work, nor the dialogue between the lovers. What one witnesses are two extreme closeups of the protagonists, and the plane that rolls down the hill, until the frame is frozen: any “action” is negated, not only the take off, but even the filming, the movement. The last image is, again, a photo of the island, not a motion picture. Thus, Ferreri’s LC is a perfect example of insolence towards the novel from which the film is derived. This could be regarded as a paradigm of adaptation: to retain the parts that serve one’s ideas and systematically subvert all the others. It ultimately exposes two divergent concepts of cinema: if cinema has, for Flaiano, the obligation to bring “un risultato di meraviglia, quello dei sogni e dell’arte,” [an effect of wonder, the same as of dreams and art] (Flaiano 1990, 741), for Ferreri, as he once said, cinema should be a “arma contro-alienante, […] un tema che […] nessuno ha mai considerato seriamente” [a weapon for anti-alienation, (…) an issue (…) nobody ever seriously considered] (Grande 1980, 5). Different breeds, indeed.

rise. (…) The dew falls and calms my senses (…). Liza (…), already in the kitchen, quietly sits down as I prepare dinner. We eat in silence] (Flaiano 1990, 851).

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Works Cited Accialini, Fulvio and Lucio Colucelli. 1979. Marco Ferreri. Milan: Il formichiere. Brunetta, Gian Piero. 1993. Storia del cinema italiano. Vol. 4. Rome: Editori Riuniti. Ferreri, Marco et al. 1991. Prima di tutto la vita. Cinecritica 21/22: 27— 43. Flaiano, Ennio. 1990. Appunti su “Melampo.” In Opere 1947-1972, by Ennio Flaiano, ed. Maria Corti and Anna Longoni, 883—902. Milan: Bompiani. —. 1990. “Melampus.” In Opere 1947-1972 by Ennio Flaiano, ed. Maria Corti and Anna Longoni, 735—851. Milan: Bompiani. —. 1978. Melampo. Turin: Einaudi. Genette, Gérard. 1997. Palinsesti. La letteratura al secondo grado. Turin: Einaudi. Grande, Maurizio. 1980. Marco Ferreri. Florence: La Nuova Italia. Leplanche, Jean and J. B. Pontalis. 1973. Enciclopedia della psicanalisi. Rome-Bari: Laterza. Masoni, Tullio. 1998. Marco Ferreri. Rome: Gremese. Natalini, Fabrizio. 2002. Ennio Flaiano: Il Melampus e il viaggio dell’eroe. Script 30/31 http://www.scriptonline.it/articolo.php?issue_id=30&issue_progr=15. Sergiacomo, Lucilla. 1996. Invito alla lettura di Flaiano. Milan: Mursia. Tassone, Aldo. 1978. Note to Melampo by Ennio Flaiano, 155—169. Turin: Einaudi. Tinazzi, Giorgio. 2007. La scrittura e lo sguardo. Cinema e letteratura. Venice: Marsilio. Venturelli, Renato. 1982. Uno scrittore per il cinema: Flaiano. Genoa: Cineclub Lumiére.

VISCONTI’S MELANCHOLIES BETWEEN MARCEL PROUST AND MARIO PRAZ: CONVERSATION PIECE SIMONE DUBROVIC, KENYON COLLEGE

Towards the end of the sixties, Luchino Visconti considered making a film based on À la recherche du temps perdu, by Marcel Proust. Along with Ennio Flaiano, he wrote a proposal outlining the characteristics of the film. Clearly it was their intention to film the Recherche making the narration revolve around Sodome et Gomorrhe, thus turning the film into a discourse about the dynamics of the suffering of love (homosexual and heterosexual love, both of which are identical in their mechanisms) through the vicissitudes of “crossed” couples: Charlus-Morel, NarratorAlbertine1. The whole theory of involuntary memory, i.e. the unexpected 1

An interesting statement, made by Visconti, about the film: “Un film sull’opera di Proust non può che essere proustiano. Cioè non deve necessariamente seguire lo sviluppo logico e cronologico della storia, ma imporsi lo sconvolgimento e il ribaltamento dei tempi. E non può nemmeno comprendere tutta l’opera, ma limitarsi ad una parte di essa, che però la evochi e la illustri. La scelta cade su Sodome et Gomorrhe, cioè sulle storie parallele di quattro personaggi: Albertine e Marcel, Charlus e Morel. […] Il film non può essere una serie di illustrazioni dell’opera, ma deve proporsi un fine proprio, di spettacolo: il che si può ottenere lasciando al Narratore, Marcel, l’evocazione di vari fatti, anche minimi, che ci daranno infine—quando ogni pezzo del mosaico sarà a posto—le due tragedie: quella di Albertine e quella di Charlus. Tutte e due riflettenti il dramma personale del Narratore […]. Circa le scene che potranno animarla [la storia], nulla bisogna aggiungere a quelle, perfette e numerose, che sono nella Recherche. Nemmeno il dialogo proustiano richiede mutamenti o aggiunte: è già essenziale” [A film based on Proust’s work can be anything but Proustian. This means that it must not necessarily follow the logical and chronological development of the tale, but impose on itself the subversion and overturning of Time. It cannot even include everything, but limit itself to a part of the work, that would still evoke and illustrate the entire work itself. The choice will be Sodome et Gomorrhe, and therefore, about the parallel tales of four characters: Albertine and Marcel, Charlus and Morel (…). The film should not be restricted to a series of illustrations from

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and happy recovery of a memory through Time’s ruins, which Proust developed in Le Temps retrouvé, seems to have been forgotten. Visconti would simply have liked to extract some events and actions from the Recherche, as a sort of performable and narrative essence. The resulting screenplay of this unrealized project, confirms that its dramaturgic and dialogic frame was to be reduced to a few “actions” of Proust’s novel, which instead consists of reflections and tangential elaborations more than narrative events2. This is in any case unimportant, since Visconti was clear about his intentions, and was well aware of the impossibility of filming the Recherche in its entirety. However the Proustian “stigma,” present and rooted in Visconti’s works, particularly in his last works, has often been trivialized by film critics considering it to be a vague idea of “recollection”; by paying attention to it as a love for a “world definitively faded,” (as noted in Luchino Visconti by Gianni Rondolino, one of the most important and complete studies on Visconti); or as containing “environmental and psychological fascinations,” and even as a “refined taste for objects, recalling precise emotional situations, filtered by memory and nostalgia.”3 the work, but must set its own spectacular purpose: what we obtain by leaving the evocation of the facts (even the least important) to the narrator, Marcel. This would give us—when all the pieces of the mosaic are in place—the two tragedies: that of Albertine and that of Charlus, both reflecting the personal drama of the narrator (…). Concerning the scenes that could breathe life into it [i.e. the tale], nothing should be added to them, perfect and numerous as they are in the Recherche. Even the Proustian dialogue does not require changes or additions: it is already essential] (Rondolino 1981, 476—477). 2 The final version of the script for this unmade film was published in Cecchi d’Amico 1986. For a bibliography on Visconti’s works, see Montesi 2001, and Montesi 2004. For the making of the film, Conversation Piece see Visconti and Treves 1975. 3 “Tuttavia nei film che Visconti realizzò a partire dal 1969—l’anno della Caduta degli dei e delle prime prove di sceneggiatura del romanzo di Proust—gli elementi che possiamo definire proustiani, o memoriali, delle sue opere precedenti si fanno più evidenti e ingombranti, quasi a significare che, pur rinunciando ormai a trarre un film dalla Recherche o comunque rimandando di anno in anno la sua realizzazione, quei temi, quel mondo definitivamente tramontato, quelle suggestioni ambientali e psicologiche, quel gusto raffinato per gli oggetti che rimandano a precise situazioni sentimentali filtrate dal ricordo e dalla nostalgia, furono per lui la materia prima dei suoi racconti cinematografici” [Nevertheless, in the films Visconti made from 1969—the year of The Damned, as well as the first screenplay attempts of Proust’s novel—the elements of his previous work defined as Proustian, or as being focused on memory, become more evident and awkward, as if to signify that, even giving up the adaptation of the Recherche or, in any case,

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These features, which, according to Rondolino, seem to be “Proustian” elements, are not thoroughly convincing and seem facile and confused, because, even if we cannot say they are not Proustian at all, of course they are not “totally” Proustian and can be found in any European novel or poem of Decadence, if not in literature in general. In order to clarify some of the Proustian aspects in Visconti’s cinema, or better still, to clarify the very particular “dialogue” between Visconti and Proust , it is useful to turn to an analysis of Conversation Piece, a film born of Mario Praz’s book, Conversation Pieces published in 1971, which offers two literary lines of comparison. Visconti’s Conversation Piece is the story of an old professor who lives alone, isolated among his books and his large collection of paintings depicting family groups, or “conversation pieces”. It is the tale about the dissolution of order, and of the intrusion of a real family into his milieu, among the fictitious families portrayed in the paintings. The real family, who are tenants, having overcome the professor’s strong resistance, deceive him and eventually, bring about his death. Film critics consider this film to be one Visconti’s minor works, primarily because of the unbalanced perception of the refined and painful portrayal, which clashes with the schematic and inert interpretation of the present4. If we see Conversation Piece from a deferring its fruition year-after-year, the themes, that world definitively faded, those environmental and psychological fascinations, that refined taste for objects recalling precise emotional situations filtered by memory and nostalgia, were the foremost concern of his cinematographic tales] (Rondolino 1981, 479). 4 “Racchiuso totalmente “in una stanza” o quasi, il dramma del professore si consuma nel microcosmo della sua intimità discreta e poi violentata, e assume il significato di una sorta di condanna della modernità, di rifiuto della società contemporanea, con i suoi eccessi, la sua perdita di valori, la promiscuità dilagante e la mancanza d’ogni ritegno morale. Anzi, il contrasto fra il protagonista e gli altri personaggi, messi lì per provocarlo di continuo con la loro presenza—diavoletti ben più ingombranti di quelli che punzecchiavano Aschenbach in Morte a Venezia—, è così radicale, addirittura didascalico nella sua esemplarità, da risultare forzato. Sicché più lo scontro si fa aspro, più il ritratto del professore, così incisivo e psicologicamente approfondito, si fa sbiadito, superficiale. Ma è questo ritratto, in ogni caso, a concentrare gli interessi di Visconti, ed è attorno a questo personaggio, esemplarmente autobiografico, che si snoda un dramma esistenziale che si consuma nella solitudine più totale, nonostante gli sforzi congiunti, suoi e degli altri, per uscirne. [...] Nei modi e nelle forme in cui Visconti vede e rappresenta il dramma del professore, cioè nell’uso della cinecamera che si sposta con delicatezza fra le pareti d’una casa che riflette, come non mai, la personalità del suo unico abitante, e nella discrezione con cui questi si muove fra gli oggetti che sono la ragione della sua vita attuale, in violento contrasto con la volgarità degli altri, risiede quella sorta di identificazione fra autore e personaggio, che

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possiamo definire autobiografismo. È una identificazione analoga a quella riscontrata in Morte a Venezia, che nasce dall’abbandono dell’abituale “oggettività” dello sguardo di Visconti a favore di una nuova ‘soggettività’ ottenuta con un diverso uso della macchina da presa e degli obbiettivi (anche qui si fa largo impiego dello zoom in funzione soggettiva e avvolgente). [...] Da un lato, insomma, c’è un dramma esistenziale vissuto in prima persona, pertanto autentico e autenticamente espresso; dall’altro, uno spaccato umano e sociale di maniera, insufficiente a costituire una valida contrapposizione dialettica a quel dramma dell’esistenza ferita, dell’approssimarsi della fine” [Almost entirely closed “in a room”, the predicament of the professor burns out in the microcosm of his privacy, first discreet and then harassed, and undertakes the meaning of a sort of condemnation of modernity, of refusal of contemporary society, with its excesses, loss of values, widespread promiscuity and lack of any kind of moral restraint. In fact, the contrast between the main character and the other characters, who are always tormenting him with their own presence—little devils far more awkward than the ones who teased Aschenbach in Death in Venice—, is so radical, even didactic in its exemplarity, that it ends up being forced. Therefore, the harsher the dispute, the more the professor’s portrayal (incisive and psychologically complete) becomes faded and superficial. But it is this portrayal, in any case, that concentrates Visconti’s interests, and it is around this character, exemplarily autobiographical, that the existential drama is filed down, completely worn out in solitude, despite the efforts of his and of the others to get out of it. (…) In the ways and the forms Visconti sees and represents the professor’s drama, in his use of the camera, which tenderly shifts among the walls of a house and reflects, in an extreme manner, the personality of its only tenant, as well as in the discretion with which he moves among those objects that are the only reason for his current existence, in violent contrast to the vulgarity of the others, the sort of identification between author and character (which we can call autobiography) resides. It is an analogous identification to the one we have seen in Death in Venice, that rises from the renunciation of the habitual ‘objectivity’ of Visconti’s gaze for a new ‘subjectivity’ achieved by a different use of the camera lens (even here we have a great use of the zoom in order to create a subjective and enveloping effect). (…) In conclusion, on one side there is the existential drama experienced in first person and therefore authentic and authentically expressed; on the other side there is the human and social cross-section that is mannered and insufficient to establish a reliable dialectical contrast to that drama of wounded existence, of the approaching end] (Rondolino 1981, 515—519). Also “Non meno del suo protagonista, Visconti appare prigioniero di una falsa coscienza. La sua contrapposizione tra il vecchio e il nuovo è priva di una reale dialettica. Quanto più critica l’accidia del suo protagonista, tanto più avvolge la figura dell’intellettuale in una anacronistica ‘aura’ ottocentesca. La descrizione dei giovani inquilini tradisce la sua mancata dimestichezza col presente. L’allusione forzosa ai golpismi di destra e le improbabili pose da ex ‘sessantottino’ di Konrad, non fanno che sottolineare la sua mancanza di rapporto con il reale” [Visconti seems to be caught in a fake conscience as much as his character is. His vision of the contrast between old and

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different perspective, however, it becomes wonderfully rich, and dense with implications. A certain poetry, perhaps recognizably Proustian, may be found in this story of isolation, in its painful dialogue with elusive presences. Both the paintings and their collection convey a sense of Art compensating for the emotional emptiness and the traumatic events in the professor’s life (such as the loss of both his mother and wife). Nevertheless, the pages Proust dedicates to the meetings with the painter, Elstir, deals with a style of painting, (something between Monet’s, Whistler’s and Redon’s),5 which abolishes all distinctions between the objects, thus introducing the idea of “multi-form and powerful unity” (Proust 1981, 894). It is the kind of painting whose charm, Proust says, “lay in a sort of metamorphosis of the objects represented, analogous to what we call metaphor in poetry” (Proust 1981, 893). Thanks to the effort and creative vision of the artist, the objects merge and their boundaries dissolve. The ghostly fragments of reality engage and reconnect with each other. Proust writes, “Elstir’s new lacks a real dialectic. The more he criticizes the sloth of the main character, the more he wraps him in an anachronistic nineteenth-century atmosphere. The description of the young tenants highlights Visconti’s non-familiarity with the present. The forced allusion to the rightist coups and Konrad’s improbable poses as a former 1968 protestor underline Visconti’s nonexistent relationship with reality] (Bencivenni 1999, 97—98). 5 “S’intende che Elstir non è, se mai ve ne siano nella Recherche, un personaggio a chiave. Eppure non è soltanto per scrupolo cronologico, d’ambientazione, che Proust ne disegna con cura la biografia pittorica. Elstir aveva esordito con delle composizioni mitologiche (stando alle date che porrebbero quell’esordio verso il 1870, è chiaro il riferimento alla pittura ‘nouvel humanisme’ di Puvis de Chavannes): e poi s’era invaghito (giusto negli anni del maggior successo parigino di Whistler) dell’arte dell’Estremo Oriente. Nell’Elstir che Marcel incontra a Balbec potrebbe avvertirsi anche, su quel fondo di psicologismo e di estetismo whistleriano, un’assai tenue sfumatura d’impressionismo alla Monet; né va dimenticata, indice di una possibile inclinazione verso il simbolismo, una rapida ma significativa citazione di Redon” [It is clear that Elstir is not a key-character, if key-characters happen to be found in the Recherche. Still it is not due to a mere scruple of chronology and setting that Proust accurately gives Elstir’s pictorial biography. He made his debut with some mythological compositions (according to the dates that would place the debut towards 1870, it is evident the recall to Puvis de Chavannes’s ‘nouvel humanisme’ painting): then (during the years of Whistler’s greatest success in Paris) he was enchanted by the Far East. In the Elstir that Marcel meets in Balbec, we could also perceive, against the background of Whistler’s psychologism and aestheticism, a slight shade of Monet’s Impressionism; we should also not forget a swift but meaningful citation of Redon that indicates a possible inclination to Symbolism] (Argan 1990, 146).

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studio appeared to me like the laboratory of new creation of the world” (Proust 1981, 892). In the cognitive progress of the narrator, who passes through the Arts of music (Vinteuil), literature (Bergotte) and painting (Elstir), “metaphor” seems to be an essential principle of a work of art: something that cinema cannot achieve. It is, therefore, interesting to read a passage from Le Temps retrouvé about the role of the writer: An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates, and what we call reality is a certain connection between these immediate sensations and the memories which envelop us simultaneously with them—a connection that is suppressed in a simple cinematographic vision, which just because it professes to confine itself to the truth in fact departs widely from it—a unique connection which the writer has to rediscover in order to link forever in his phrase the two sets of phenomena which reality joins together. He can describe a scene by describing one after another the innumerable objects which at a given moment were present at a particular place, but truth will be attained by him only when he takes two different objects, states the connection between them—a connection analogous in the world of art to the unique connection which in the world of science is provided by the law of causality—and encloses them in the necessary links of a well-wrought style; truth—and life too—can be attained by us only when, by comparing a quality common to two sensations, we succeed in extracting their common essence and in reuniting them to each other, liberated from the contingencies of time, within a metaphor (Proust 1981, vol. 3, 924— 925). 6

While the Narrator is in Elstir’s atelier, the hot afternoon in Balbec filters through “…one small rectangular window [...] embowered by honeysuckle…”(Proust 1981, 892), with all the sad joy of an elusive reality, which becomes “art” in order to be grasped and held, a reality made up of perennially undefined beings. In Elstir’s atelier, significantly, the Narrator has the unexpected opportunity of being introduced to the beloved, though unknown Albertine, who appears to be a superimposition of memories, moments, fantasies, always and in all ways “different”: …I have said that Albertine had not seemed to me that day to be the same as on previous days, and that each time I saw her she was to appear different (Proust 1981, 916). 6

“Some critics now liked to regard the novel as a sort of procession of things upon the screen of a cinematograph. This comparison was absurd. Nothing is further from what we have really perceived than the vision that the cinematograph presents” (Proust 1981, 917).

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Visconti’s Melancholies between Marcel Proust and Mario Praz That Albertine was scarcely more than a silhouette, all that had been superimposed upon her being of my own invention […] (Proust 1981, 917—981). There was certainly a girl sitting there in a silk frock, bareheaded, but one whose marvelous hair, whose nose, whose complexion, meant nothing to me, in whom I did not recognize the human entity that I had extracted from a young cyclist in polo-cap strolling past between myself and the sea. Nevertheless, it was Albertine… (Proust 1981, 930—931).

The situation in Conversation Piece is not the same. We perceive the professor’s reiterated obsession with collecting (and not “creating”) paintings of family portraits. This kind of pictorial genre has nothing we could define as “metaphorical”; they are reproductions (even if they are encomiastic or idealized) of family moments. The book, Conversation Pieces, by Mario Praz, offers a detailed explanation of what the conversation pieces are “paintings, usually not of large dimensions, which represent two or more identifiable people in attitudes implying that they are conversing or communicating with each other informally, against a background reproduced in detail” (Praz 1971, 33). Elsewhere in the book we read a curious account which sounds very familiar, if we consider the peculiarities of Luchino Visconti’s cinema. Recalling the Biedermeier period (of which he was a collector), Praz points out: “the meticulous precision of the Biedermeier painters, who reproduced every detail of a room […] and the minute realism which delighted in rendering headdresses, braids, and lace as if in a mirror” (Praz 1971, 27).7 7

Also interesting, in order to understand the representation of the “interiors” in Proust as well, (and we may notice some similarities as well as substantial differences in Visconti, whose attention to objects and details has approached a sort of “fetishism”), this comment by Praz: “Vedremo dalle lettere di Proust a Madame C. come gli oggetti non gl’ispirassero mai l’appassionata devozione d’un amatore. I mobili avevano un’anima: egli era pronto a riconoscerlo, e a dissertare poeticamente su questo tema, ma gli oggetti rimanevano per lui oggetti, dopo tutto, non divenivano idoli come per Goncourt e Montesquiou. Questo punto di vista del buonsenso ci può sorprendere in un raffinato come Proust: né è questa la sola sorpresa che avremo esaminando il suo comportamento a questo proposito nella vita ordinaria. Egli veramente non tiene a oggetti singoli, è solo estremamente sensibile all’atmosfera d’un ambiente. [...] Non si può fare a meno di concludere che egli s’interessava soprattutto di individui, di costumi sociali, e delle proprie reazioni a essi. Le cose lo interessavano prima di tutto come indicazioni d’un gusto, come elementi sussidiari per la rivelazione del carattere: per le cose in se stesse egli provava solo una moderata attrazione; quando s’interessava ad esse, tendeva ad ascriver loro curiosi comportamenti antropomorfici—il che conferma

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Praz’s essay was the origin of Visconti’s idea and, on looking through the book, one recognizes several paintings that are reproduced in the film, covering the walls of the professor’s library. One painting in particular, given to the professor by the tenants to win his sympathy, on page 102, is by the painter Johann Zoffany, and bears the title, Lord Willoughby de Broke and His Family.8 Visconti must have meditated a long time on the meaning of these paintings. It is not difficult for us to discern the director’s pensive, bitter reflection, under the guidance of Mario Praz, concerning

come i suoi interessi fossero prevalentemente psicologici e sociali” [From the letters Proust sent to Madame C. we will see how objects did not inspire in him the passionate devotion of a lover. Furniture had a soul: he was willing to recognize that and to discourse poetically about this theme, but objects, after all, remained to him just objects and they did not become idols like for Goncourt and Montesquieu. This good sense as a point of view could leave us surprised about a refined man like Proust: and this is not even the only surprise we would get by examining his behavior about that in ordinary day life. He does not really care for single objects, he is just extremely sensitive to the atmosphere of a setting. (…) We should do anything else but concluding that he was more interested in people, social habits, and his own reactions to those. Things interested him first of all as a mark of taste, as subsidiary elements for the revelation of a character: about things in and of themselves he felt just a moderate attraction; when he was interested in them, he tended to associate to them some strange anthropomorphic behaviors—which confirms how he mainly had psychological and social interests] (Praz 1990, 106). 8 “Johann Zoffany painted Lord Willoughby de Broke and his Family taking tea in the breakfast-room at Compton Verney (the silver tea urn is still in the family’s possession). The pyramidal composition of the group (the right section is particularly emphasized by the inclined posture of the father and the child pulling the red wooden horse) and the gestures of the children are typical of ‘conversations’, as we have had occasion to remark several times, but the painting, like all Zoffany’s paintings, charms us by its neatness and elegance” (Praz, 1971, 104). Elsewhere Praz deals with the “minute realism” we find in painters of conversation pieces and especially in Zoffany: “Their minute realism—Zoffany’s in particular—was ennobled by a heraldic elegance which, penetrating beyond appearances, showed glimpses of the type, the perfect exemplar: the complete gentleman, the thoroughbred horse or dog, the perfectly planned park, the inimitably intimate room. It is a realism which reflects not so much life as the douceur de vivre. The hallmark which this kind of art has in common with the most exquisitely English products (furniture by famous eighteenth-century cabinetmakers; couches; clothes and footwear by renowned firms) is quality. The most perfect interpreter of this aristocratic society—it seems strange, but on the contrary it is very natural if one thinks of analogous cases, Proust for instance— was, as we have said before, a Bohemian Jew, who was also—as we might have expected—something of a snob and a megalomaniac [...]” (Praz 1990, 128).

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the meaning of his work and his cinema.9 Conversation Piece is a series of portraits framed by other portraits, in which the characters talk, interact, love, hate, attempt ephemeral reconciliations while they are inscribed into a space characterized, in the manner of Visconti, by minute details, a space which deepens and clarifies the psychological relationships, which is to say that cinema merely describes surfaces and connections, while perhaps adumbrating an unbridgeable chasm of emptiness. The scholar Odile Larere has dedicated her book, De l’imaginaire au cinema, entirely to Conversation Piece, in which she has disclosed all the imaginary features of the film. On reading the story, once again we see the professor in his library, surrounded by his books and the paintings, which foreshadow the arrival of the family soon to upset his peace. The lascivious statues, which announce the young Konrad’s, Stefano’s and Lietta’s orgy; the stone faces on the balcony, darkened by rain, almost as decomposed as the world of their owner; the repairs taking place in the apartment above, where the tenants are to settle in, and where the torn down walls collapse, (thus marking the invasion of overbearing emotions and the real presence of human beings); the closed doors which initially open with resistance but then open with indolent submissiveness, when the professor’s solitude is, finally, definitively disrupted. Everything in the 9

Note what Praz says about a strange coincidence: “Ma da un’ispirazione profetica doveva essere animato Luchino Visconti quando (a sua stessa confessione in interviste sui giornali) prendendo le mosse dalle mie Scene di conversazione pel suo film Ritratto di famiglia in un interno metteva a protagonista un vecchio professore assistito da un’anziana domestica (qui evidentemente alludeva a una situazione simile alla mia), ma anche immaginava che nello stesso casamento venisse ad abitare una banda di giovani drogati e dissoluti. Che è press’a poco quello che è accaduto, ma soltanto dopo la presentazione del film, nel palazzo ove abito. Il film, come potei constatare, è rispettoso verso il mio sosia, e forse esagera nei riguardi dei coinquilini, di cui dirò solo che, venendo richiesto dal più notorio di essi, della dedica di un mio libro, vi scrissi: ‘Per [seguiva il nome] vicino di casa, lontano d’idee” [Luchino Visconti should be animated by a prophetic inspiration when (according to what he has said in newspaper interviews) moving from my book, Conversation Pieces, for his film, Conversation Piece, he put an old professor as the main character who is assisted by an elderly maid (and here Visconti was evidently referring to a situation similar to mine), but he also imagined that in the same house a gang of doped and depraved young men arrived as tenants. This is more or less what happened (but after the film’s release) in the building where I live. The film, as I have been able to verify, is respectful towards my double, and perhaps over-emphasizes somewhat regarding the co-tenants about whom I will just say that, asked by the most famous of them, for a dedication on a book of mine, I wrote: ‘To [here was his name] close because of residence, far because of ideas] (Praz 2002, 1189).

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film is a conversation piece: the flashlight which illuminates the faces of both the professor and Konrad in the darkness, thus defining the distrust and tension that are crucial to the emotional relationship; the telephone Konrad hands to the professor—the first sign of complicit—that ends with the young man placing his hand on the old professor’s shoulder, while the two are looking at one of the paintings in the collection, a painting that Konrad recognizes as being painted by Arthur Devis to the surprise and pleasure of the owner, who had not known himself who the painter was.10 The “topical” situations present in the pictorial genre of the “conversation piece” are fully respected by Visconti: Praz talks about 10

“Cette connivence naissante ne se fait pas sans gêne. Les mouvements mal coordonnés des deux protagonistes dans la bibliothèque couverte de housses, trahissent un malaise que Konrad évacue en mettant un disque: Vorrei spiegarvi de Mozart. De la complicité à l’image on passe à la communion dans la musique. Dans le plan semi-ensemble, les deux personnages sont regroupés autour de l’électrophone et la lumière blanche de la pochette du disque, ou bien sont filmés en très gros plans, comme on regarde les êtres que l’on aime. Les autres éléments du cadre se fondent alors dans l’obscurité de telle sorte que l’attention ne puisse être attirée par aucun objet décoratif et que rien ne détourne le spectateur de leur ‘être ensemble’. Lumière, cadrage, musique renvoient donc à l’idée du bonheur, communion sans doute insoutenable que Konrad rompt en ressaisissant le téléphone. Aussitôt suit une sorte de déséquilibre à l’image: le Professeur détourne la tête comme pour regarder en lui-même, mais déjà Konrad ne le laisse pas s’éloigner plus longtemps: ‘Ce tableau est bien d’Arthur Devis’. Par une remarquable mise en scène, le geste de la main de Konrad entraîne le Professeur vers son tableau, où Konrad le rejoint en lui mettant la main sur l’épaule” [This rising intimacy is not found without unease. The badly coordinated movements of the two main characters, in the library covered by dust-sheets, reveal a disquietness that Konrad eliminates by putting on a long-playing record: Vorrei spiegarvi by Mozart. From the complicity in the image, we move to the communion in the music. In the shot (plan semi-ensemble), the two characters are gathered around the turntable and in the white light of the record’s envelop, or framed in a close-up, in the way one sees the beings he loves. Then the other elements of the frame are molten into the darkness, so that the attention cannot be distracted by any other decorative object and nothing can take the spectator’s mind off of their ‘being together’. Light, frame, and music, therefore, refer to the idea of happiness, a communion that is undoubtedly unbearable and that Konrad interrupts by picking the telephone up again. Suddenly an imbalance in the image takes place: the Professor turns his head as if to see something within himself, but at that point Konrad will not let him turn away for any length of time: ‘This painting is by Arthur Davis’. Thanks to Visconti’s remarkable direction, the gesture of Konrad’s hand drags the Professor to the painting he owns, where Konrad reaches him by putting his hand on the Professor’s shoulder] (Larere 1980, 48). For the importance of the “hands” in paintings see in particular Praz 1990, 48—51.

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Conversation round a Table11 which immediately bring to mind images of breakfasts, lunches and suppers so prominent in Visconti, not only in this film, but also in such films as The Leopard, Sandra of a Thousand Delights, The Damned, Death in Venice, Ludwig, and right up to The Innocent. The table is the unifying element of forces, which lead the characters, at times, to love, to quarrel, and even to want to destroy each other. Even in certain marginal particulars of the “conversation pieces”, such as the presence of animals, Visconti rigorously sticks to the genre, (as well as to Praz’s reading). For example, at a certain moment, the young people give the professor a blackbird that obsessively repeats the mocking (and painful) refrain: “Thank you, old man”12. Praz also discusses Mourning Pictures and Portraits with a Bust13, where the group of people that converse or interact is accompanied by the presence of a silent bust: a departed ancestor, a lost affection. We find such a bust in the “secret room” (one of Visconti’s most felicitous and poetic inventions, very similar to the “cistern” that the two siblings in Sandra of a Thousand Delights choose in order to find a private place for their ambiguous love, or reminiscent of the “cave” in which King Ludwig finds shelter among swans). This is the red room, hidden behind the stern, grey library, where the professor hides Konrad, after having found him beaten and bleeding. It is the room which the mother had used to hide partisans and Jews, during the war and the persecution, the room Odile Larere calls: “chambre de la Résistance”, understanding “resistance” in the psychological sense as 11 “Among the devices first employed by painters to represent a group was the placing of figures round a laid table, were it laid only with a fruit-basket. This was a means of establishing a natural relationship amongst them. Just as men first formed a circle in order to discuss some animal killed in a hunt, so, to bring their groups of people together, painters found out that their problem was solved by making them sit round a table” (Praz 1990, 95). 12 Moreover the professor, in one of his flashbacks to childhood, remembers his grandfather’s “cat.” 13 “On the imaginary wall upon which I have grouped them, these “conversations” of living beings with marble busts make a curious show: hands that point, eyes that fix on adored images, allegorical attributes negligently laid on the floor. All this bespeaks a cult of which only a feeble memory lingers with us. What is the meaning of this rather rhetorical pantomime? Of this moral picture which admonishes and instructs? We do not see anything like it in modern homes, and nowadays we find such rhetoric astonishing. Yet it was as familiar a century ago as it was fifteen hundred years earlier. People who had themselves thus represented believed in Plutarch’s heroes, and were not after all so far removed from the ancient Romans who kept wax busts of their ancestors in the most stately part of the house” (Praz 1990, 221).

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being a particular psychological state-of-mind—a secret realm of a loss, of a deep and insurmountable conditioning—tied to the figure of the mother, whose presence in the room, we perceive through the feminine bust14. All of these dense relationships, under the guise of naturalness, give greater meaning to this film, in which the nocturnal and diurnal “phases”

14

“Cette porte était jusqu’ici dissimulée dans les rayonnages de la bibliothèque. Nous l’appellerons ‘chambre de la Résistance’ parce que la mère du Professeur y cachait les résistants pendant la guerre, et parce qu’elle évoque un lieu psychique difficilement accessible, ne s’ouvrant que pour se refermer, sous l’effet d’une censure que Freud nomme ‘la résistance’. C’est dans cette chambre que, deux séquences plus tard, le Professeur cachera Konrad” [So far this door was hidden by the shelves of the library. We will call it ‘the room of Resistance’ because the Professor’s mother used to hide Resistance fighters here during the war, and because it evokes a psychic place difficult to access, a place that is opened just to be closed again, under the effect of a censorship that Freud calls ‘Resistance’. It is in this room that, two sequences later, the Professor will hide Konrad] (Larere, 58). “La première scène se passe dans la chambre de la Résistance. Konrad, blessé, est soigné par le Professeur. Son seul désir est de cacher l’humiliation de l’agression qu’il a subie. Aussi argumente-t-il avec le maître de maison pour éviter la police, les journalistes, le docteur, et lui demande-t-il d’aller effacer les traces de sang. Toutefois ce discours ne justifierait pas le rôle décisif de ce début de séquence, s’il n’était appuyé par la mise en scène. L’ensemble traduit l’incertitude et la tension qui précèdent toute rencontre profonde à la fois désirée et redoutée. L’emplacement où se situe l’épisode est en lui-même significatif: la chambre de la Résistance, chambre secrète, chambre cachée, métaphore possible de l’inconscient, est un lieu où il n’est plus possible de mentir. La seule statue de cette pièce, le buste d’une femme, prouve que ce qui rôde en cet endroit secrètement gardé est la présence de la mère” [The first scene takes place in the room of Resistance. Konrad, wounded, is nursed by the Professor. His only desire is to hide the humiliation of the aggression he suffered. In this way he explains the fact to the owner of the house in order to avoid the police, the journalists, the doctor and he asks him to remove the traces of blood. Nonetheless this discourse will not justify the decisive importance of this sequence’s beginning, if it were not supported by Visconti’s direction. The ensemble reveals the uncertainty and the tension that precede every profound meeting, desired and feared at the same time. The space where the episode is set is significant in itself: the room of Resistance, secret room, hidden room, possible metaphor of the unconscious, is a place where it is no longer possible to lie. The only statue in this room, a woman’s bust, testifies that what roams in this secretly kept place is the presence of the mother] (Larere, 62). Even in the film Sandra of a thousand delights we find something similar when Sandra visits the closed room of her mother and tenderly caresses the plaster cast of her mother’s hand. See the definition of Résistance in Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973, 420—423.

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have great significance, changing the interiors themselves from areas of intimacy to areas in which order and control suddenly reappear. There is a poetry of the “moment,” in Visconti’s film, closer to the Proust of Les plaisirs et les jours than to the Proust of the Recherche, that youthful Proust, who painfully perceives the sense of time but does not yet have at his disposal the illumination of how to overcome it. In connection with this, we might consider the first conversation between the professor and Konrad, an aria playing on the turntable (Vorrei spiegarvi, oh Dio! by Mozart, composed in 1783 for the opera Il curioso indiscreto by Pasquale Anfossi). After the young man has gone, the professor puts the aria on again, as if he wanted to hold onto and repeat a lost enchantment15. However, the most evident quotation from Proust is when the professor tells of the mysterious tenant, mentioned by one of his most beloved writers (whose name he does not reveal), all of whose books he has in his room and rereads continuously. It is the image of death as a tenant, whose presence is, at first, sporadic and then becomes more assiduous and constant. The quotation is taken from Le côté de Guermantes, at the moment in which, after a walk to the Champs-Élysées while pretending that everything is still normal and calm, the Narrator realizes that his grandmother, by now, is terminally ill and going to die.16 This Proustian 15 Note what Praz says concerning the same enchantment in describing a picture: “The harmonious peace communicated by the picture is that of the fleeting moment come to a standstill. The long sitting achieves the effect of a metaphysical snapshot. The impression is the same as the one which Virginia Woolf received from an episode in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park: ‘Here is nothing out of the way; it is midday in Northamptonshire; a dull young man is talking to a rather weakly young woman on the stairs as they go up to dress for dinner, with housemaids passing. But from triviality, from commonplace, their words become suddenly full of meaning, and the moment for both one of the most memorable in their lives. It fills itself; it shines; it glows; it hangs before us, deep, trembling, serene for a second; next the housemaid passes, and this drop, in which all the happiness of life has collected, gently subsides again to become part of the ebb and flow of ordinary existence’” (Praz 1990, 59). 16 “But it is rare for these grave illnesses, such as that which now at last had struck her full in the face, not to take up residence in a sick person a long time before killing him, during which period they hasten, like a ‘sociable’ neighbour or tenant, to make themselves known to him. A terrible acquaintance, not so much for the sufferings that it causes as for the strange novelty of the terminal restrictions that it imposes upon life. We see ourselves dying, in these cases, not at the actual moment of death but months, sometimes years before, when death has hideously come to dwell in us. We make the acquaintance of the Stranger whom we hear coming and going in our brain” (Proust 1981, vol. 2, 326—327).

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fragment, chosen by Visconti, is sufficient to place the sense of cinema into an aborted perspective: unlike Proust who, in an unpredictable revelation of involuntary memory, is able to find a miserable though redeeming resurrection, cinema can only reveal death at work. The film opens with the explosion in which Konrad dies and with the reading of the professor’s electrocardiogram.17 Thus the beginning of a film (and of life?), for Visconti, means to die. The vanity of everything is definitively underlined by the final panning shot, as the professor confesses to the tenant’s family, the Brumontis, who have awoken him from a sleep as profound, insensitive and as deaf as death itself. It is night and, while the professor is speaking, the camera passes over the painted families hanging on the walls, and then returns to the professor who, with his back turned towards the camera, is looking out the window at the roofs of Rome. He is framed by the window, as if he were a painted portrait. But the time has changed. Now it is the time of the day when the professor is alone again. This temporal improbability (and impossibility), very rare in Visconti (possibly to be found in White Nights),18 “strips” the veil that covered the emptiness. 17

“Contrairement à certains génériques qui donnent, avec les noms des acteurs et des auteurs, des informations relatives au récit—(lieux, personnages, événements)—le générique de Violence et Passion ne livre, hormis le ruban de l’électrocardiogramme, que des données d’ordre sémiotique: couleurs, mouvements, bruits et musique. Ces données, cependant, ne sont pas étrangères à la narration, puisqu’elles sont les interprétants des conditions souterraines qui permettent la possibilité même de l’histoire. Le film en effet s’ouvre sur trente secondes de silence accompagnant une image entièrement noire. Ces deux éléments, visuel et auditif, se redoublent l’un l’autre pour suggérer l’idée de néant, puisque le noir évoque la couleur du ‘rien’, ‘un silence éternel, sans avenir, sans l’espérance même d’un avenir’” [Contrary to the title shots that give, together with the names of actors and authors, some information about the tale—(places, characters, events)—the title shots of Conversation Piece offer, with the exception of the electrocardiogram’s read-out, only some data of a semiotic value: colors, movements, noises and music. However these data are not extraneous to the narration, because they are the ones to interpret some subterranean conditions that allow the same possibility of the story. The film, in fact, opens on thirty seconds of silence that accompany an entirely black image. These two elements, visual and auditive, double each other in order to suggest the idea of nothingness, because black evokes the color of ‘nothing’, ‘an eternal silence, without future, without future’s hope itself] (Larere 1980, 25). 18 “C’est justement ce temps, qui amalgame les époques, l’irréel et le réel, en dehors de toute chronologie objective, qui est évoqué par le surprenant montage du monologue du Professeur à la fin du dîner: situé entre la nuit et le jour, entre la famille Brumonti et les représentations imaginaires (les tableaux, les livres, le pas

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In this interior,19 in this very complex and bitterly impenetrable “brainpan”, the destiny of cinema, for Visconti, seems to be enclosed: “stealing” images from reality, “collecting” images that follow one another. In his second-last film, Visconti, the most cultured and literary director of Italian cinema, finally showed the “failure” of his dream of adapting Marcel Proust’s Recherche. He used a complicated and almost cryptically articulated series of suggestions and direct quotations from Proust’s work and world, eventually pointing out the description of “surfaces” (the one of cinema), which cannot reproduce the mechanisms of knowledge carried out in literature through the resource of metaphor. Finally, a possible confirmation of Visconti’s regret for literature, might be found in his last film, The Innocent, where the writer d’Arborio (the other actual “innocent” of the story, in addition to the murdered baby), after his death, is remembered by the books on display in the windows of de la mort), le monologue se déroule dans un temps irréductible à toute mesure, sorte d’instant où se précipitent des événements concrets et des objets imaginaires curieusement assemblés, et qui annonce définitivement la fin du vieil homme. […] Rarement metteur en scène aura si fortement montré comment la temporalité imaginaire, qui agit dans la vie quotidienne par l’intervalle qu’elle instaure par rapport aux événements réels, se substitue à eux au moment où la réalité s’efface, comme si le désir était, dans le travail du trépas, la dernière activité qui finisse par mourir. Ce double élargissement du temps référentiel met ainsi l’accent sur le deux réalités ultimes: l’Histoire et l’imaginaire, réalités que le metteur en scène a traitées séparément dans des films comme La terre tremble et Les nuits blanches et que, dans la maturité de son art, il concilie pour dévoiler les contradictions essentielles entre les êtres” [It is precisely this time, which amalgamates the periods, the unreal and the real, to be out of any kind of objective chronology, a time that is evoked by the surprising editing of the Professor’s monologue at the end of the supper: placed between night and day, between Brumonti’s family and the imaginary representations (paintings, books, Death’s steps), the monologue happens in a time that cannot be reduced to any kind of measure, a sort of instant where concrete events and imaginary curiously assembled objects plunge, an instant that definitively announces the end of the old man. (…) Rarely a film director would so strongly show how imaginary times, which act on ordinary life through the interval they set in relation to real events, take real events’ place when reality disappears, as if desire were, in the torment of the passage, the last activity that ends with death. This double enlargement of referential time points out two different final realities: History and Imagery, realities that the film director treated separately in films like The Earth Trembles and White Nights and that, in the maturity of his own art, he conciliates in order to reveal the essential contradictions among beings] (Larere 1980, 131—132). 19 The Italian title of the film is Gruppo di famiglia in un interno, which gives the idea of a story totally shot on a set inside.

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bookshops at night, seemingly keeping vigil over him (exactly like the writer Bergotte in the Recherche).20 They are calm and protective, like angels with unfolded wings, symbols of resurrection.

Works Cited Argan, Giulio Carlo. 1990. Elstir o della pittura. In Proust e la critica italiana, ed. Paolo Pinto and Giuseppe Grasso, 145—153. Rome: Newton Compton. Bencivenni, Alessandro. 1999. Luchino Visconti. Milan: Il Castoro. Cecchi d’Amico, Suso, and Luchino Visconti. 1986. Alla ricerca del tempo perduto: sceneggiatura dall’opera di Marcel Proust. Milan: Mondadori. Laplanche, Jean and J. B. Pontalis. 1973. Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse. Paris: PUF. Larere, Odile. 1980. De l’imaginaire au cinéma. Violence et Passion de Luchino Visconti. Paris: Éditions Albatros. Liandrat-Guigues, Suzanne. 1999. Le couchant et l’aurore: sur le cinema de Luchino Visconti. Paris: Klincksieck. Montesi, Antonella. 2004. BiblioVisconti. Vol. 2. Rome: Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia-Fondazione Istituto Gramsci onlus. —. 2001. BiblioVisconti. Vol. 1. Rome: Scuola Nazionale di CinemaFondazione Istituto Gramsci onlus. Praz, Mario. 2002. Bellezza e bizzarria. Saggi scelti. Milan: Mondadori. —. 1990. Gli “interni” di Proust. In Proust e la critica italiana, ed. Paolo Pinto and Giuseppe Grasso, 99—109. Rome: Newton Compton. —. 1971. Conversation Pieces. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Proust, Marcel. 1981. Remembrance of things past. Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin and Andreas Mayor. New York: Random House. 20 “They buried him, but all through that night of mourning, in the lighted shopwindows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection” (Proust 1981, vol. 3, 186). We should not forget that during the thirties Visconti attempted to be a writer before becoming a director. He left an unfinished novel titled Angelo, published in 1993 by René de Ceccatty, who shows in his introduction how some themes of the novel would be reflected in Visconti’s filmography: themes such as the relationship with the mother; homosexuality and youth; purity and contamination. Some interesting remarks about the thematic importance of Angelo are also in Liandrat-Guigues 1999, 20—21.

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Rondolino, Gianni. 1981. Luchino Visconti. Turin: UTET. Visconti, Luchino and Giorgio Treves. 1975. Gruppo di famiglia in un interno. Bologna: Cappelli. Visconti, Luchino. 1993. Angelo. Rome: Editori Riuniti.

A WRITER CANNOT BELIEVE TWO STORIES AT ONCE: MODES OF ADAPTATION IN LA LUNGA NOTTE DEL ’43 (FLORESTANO VANCINI, 1960) FEDERICA VILLA, DAMS TORINO

Te ne sei accorto? James Stewart alla finestra, col cannocchiale? Ma è proprio lui, la stessa cosa, è Pino Barilari! Don’t you realize? James Stewart at the window, with the telescope? It’s him, the same thing. It’s Pino Barilari! —G.B.

1. Three ways of seeing the film adaptation of “Una notte del ’43” Discussing adaptation is a complex enterprise, especially in light of the renewed attention that the subject has recently received regarding questions of its general theoretical definition and individual case studies1. This essay addresses the question of adaptation, proposing a possible symptomatology, starting from an analysis of the cinematographic transposition of Giorgio Bassani’s short story “Una notte del ’43”. Florestano Vancini’s 1960 film, La lunga notte del ’43, suggests three possible paths toward a different and multi-faceted definition of adaptation, in a certain sense accentuating its problematic nature.2 First, to 1

There have been a vast number of recently published works that address the question of adaptation. This essay takes the following texts as points of reference: Welsh and Ley 2007; Hutcheon 2006; Sanders 2006. Particularly relevant reference works for this essay include: Stam and Raengo 2004; Stam 2005; Stam and Raengo 2005; as well as the important Naremore 2000. 2 Here I propose three possible modalities for understanding adaptation, partially borrowed from the bibliography presented in the preceding note. It is not my intention to illustrate their complexity in theoretical terms, nor to prove their

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study the transition of the novel to film means to problematize the presumption of finding a simple binary relationship between two texts that lend themselves to comparison. To instead think of adaptation as adjustment to a specific context means putting into play a plurality of texts and discourses that explode a simple comparative analysis. Bassani’s story, first published in 1955, was rushed onto film in 1960. That particular moment collaborated in the process of rewriting the short story, affecting the themes and style of storytelling; it provoked a sort of biological adjustment to the cinematographic fabric and demonstrated an instinctive spirit of survival. This means thinking of adaptation as an organic body that enters into contact with its own environment, asserting itself, taking shape in relation to the symbolic and social forms that comprise its contemporary landscape. Second, adaptation nonetheless remains a mode of translation: the passage from one form of writing to another. This does not contradict the preceding assertion, but rather seems to reinforce it. Adaptation, here understood as the operator of equivalences, establishes forms of correspondence between narratives, languages, and textual practices. In play is the quality of the writing. In this case, this means conceiving of “Una notte del ‘43” as a work inherently concerned with the act of viewing. Beyond the explicit inscription of filmic experiences in the narrative fabric—for example, Anna goes to the Ristori Movie Theater— Bassani’s entire story hinges on Pino Barilari’s spectatorship, constructing a dynamic between seeing subject and seen object that entails the continual translation of his visual strategies and point-of-view. There is also a third possibility for understanding adaptation, which this case seems to suggest. To adapt also means to put in motion a process that involves different biographies: those of the writer and director, but also, obviously, those of the screenwriters and those who find themselves involved in the task of the film’s production. Moreover, these biographies combine with others that form the cultural present, in an overall picture that highlights personalities in their encounter. What is interesting from this perspective is thinking of adaptation as a field of relationships in continuous flux between different subjects, rather than as a question related to two closed texts—one original and the other the byproduct. In this sense, studying a single case of adaptation means opening up to a chapter of the history of film, to search out its subjectivities, to proceed, according to a circumstantial paradigm, to the reconstruction of the moves analytical efficacy. Rather, I use them as helpful suggestions for a better definition of this case study.

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that have constructed the possibility of the existence of adaptation. Vancini’s La lunga notte del ’43 is an Italian film from 1960, and its contributing screenwriters included Ennio De Concini and Pier Paolo Pasolini. What is the relationship of these men to Bassani? What contact did they have before the film’s release? This angle of the investigation is, upon closer examination, very interesting precisely because, as has already been noted elsewhere3, during the 1950s there was a boom in literary works that found an almost immediate cinematographic echo, with writer and director finding themselves in close contact, thinking through the process of adaptation together.

2. Continuing to live in time The concept of adaptation as adjustment raises a very Bassanian problem: that of the unstable and restless nature of his writing. Il Romanzo di Ferrara è stato scritto tra il 1938 (ho cominciato a scriverlo con i miei primi racconti) e il 1978, se vuole, e l’opera è in progress, perché io sono ancora vivo, continuo a vivere ancora. Quanto alla mia insoddisfazione, legata al libro come opera conclusa, è inevitabile che accada, è la tragedia che sta alla base dell’operare artistico, ma non solo, della vita stessa; la mia insoddisfazione forse è anche questo, ma non solo questo. Romanzo di Ferrara was written between 1938 (I began to write it with my first short stories) and 1978, if you’d like, and the work is in progress, because I am still alive, I still continue to live. Regarding my dissatisfaction linked to the book as a finished work, it is inevitable that this should be, it is the tragedy that is at the base of artistic operation, but also of life itself; my dissatisfaction is maybe also this, though not only this.

Bassani made this comment during an interview with Anna Dolfi in 1979 published the following year in Contesto, when Mondadori released the definitive version of Romanzo (Dolfi 2003, 171). They are words that summarize the ever-changing nature of the writer: an instability tied to his own life, which is deeply-rooted at the same time as he continues to modify, redefine, and re-work the language. Continuing to live means, then, continuing to correct, letting the writing pulsate as if it were a vital substance rather than fixing it in the mournful position of definitive 3

This hypothesis regards 1950s adaptations of works by Alberto Moravia and Vasco Pratolini. On this subject, see Villa 2000.

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version. Cinque storie ferraresi, the collection that includes “Una notte del ’43,” is an emblematic example of this mode of understanding the creative process. “Una notte del ‘43” was first published in 1955 in Botteghe Oscure, and then in book form by Einaudi in 1956 as one of the Cinque storie ferraresi. In 1958 it was republished in the anthology Racconti italiani, edited by Giovanni Carocci, with an introduction by Alberto Moravia and illustrations by Giulio Confalonieri. The 1956 version was reprinted in 1960 by Einaudi, with the same five stories, to which the story “Gli occhiali d’oro” was added under the title Storie ferraresi. In 1973, a new, completely revised, edition of Cinque storie ferraresi was published as Dentro le mura. In 1974, a slightly different version of the story became part of Romanzo di Ferrara. The 1980 edition brought other variations.4 In other words, the literary original is itself a work in continual state of adaptation, modified over the arc of at least twenty-five years. When Vancini decided to base his first film on this story—“Credo che non avrei potuto debuttare con nessun altro film”5 [I think I could not have debuted with any other film]—there were at least four versions of Bassani’s work at his disposal. Although the director privileged the 1956 version of Cinque storie ferraresi, it is evident that he found himself beginning from an unstable and mutable starting point, completely deprived of an unalterable original. When asked about the reasons for his abstention from the screenwriting table of this film, Bassani said: Non mi sono sentito di collaborare alla sceneggiatura del film, perché non volevo firmare una versione della storia di Pino Barilari e di sua moglie Anna e di Sciagura, diversa da quella che ho scritto nel 1955, e poi modificata e pubblicata nel volume del ’56. Come può uno scrittore credere a due storie contemporaneamente? Uno scrittore del mio tipo, poi, il cui sforzo maggiore è soprattutto quello di avvicinare il più possibile il documento all’intuizione poetica, in modo che l’uno trascolori nell’altro? (Carocci 1958, 107—150) 4

Libro primo [Book I] of Romanzo di Ferrara, which contains the short stories “Lida Mantovani,” “La passeggiata prima di cena,” “Una lapide in via Mazzini,” “Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti,” and “Una notte del ’43,” has a complex textual history which has been the object of years of critical studies. Of the major studies on its variations, see: Baldelli 1965; Baldelli 1974; Haller 1977; Moestrup 1981. 5 Vancini remembers that his friend Valerio Zurlini was the one who had him read Bassani’s story and suggested that he make a film version: “Sembrava ovvio, ma su di me quel suggerimento ebbe l’effetto di una folgorazione. Sì, dovevo fare quel film” [It seemed obvious, but it had the effect of a lightning strike on me. Yes, I needed to make that film] (Vancini 1993, 33). This volume also contains a very interesting introductory essay by Guido Fink, entitled “Le tre notti del 1943.”

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I did not feel like participating in the writing of the film because I didn’t want to put my stamp of approval on one version of the story of Pino Barilari, his wife Anna, and Sciagura, which was different than the one I had written in 1955 and then modified and published in the 1956 book. How can a writer believe two stories at the same time? Especially a writer like me, whose main goal is that of having the document approach poetic intuition as closely as possible, so that one melds into the other?

Bassani describes the film as a different story. It is essentially a story that coexists with another story that is similar though, naturally, not the same. Bassani is convinced that a writer in a particular moment can believe in one and only one version of a story: only diachrony, indeed the becoming of existence and of History, can be the witness and guarantor of variations. Thus the rifts that are created between the story (1956) and the film (1960) are not legible as signs of infidelity at all; rather, they are indications that something else has taken shape, itself adjusting in that perennial melding of the document into poetic intuition. In this dialectic between contemporaneity and diachrony in relation to stories that are similar but not the same, we also find Bassani’s natural antipathy toward cinematographic adaptations of his works6. We will begin, then, with this poetic disdain to discover the variations between the story and the film, and interpret them as wounds capable of explaining these readings of adaptation.

3. Immobility, testimony, guilt Pino Barilari is a spectator. As a spectator, he is immobile, a witness, and guilty, at least in Bassani’s work. Dolfi aptly notes: A Pino Barilari è demandato il compito di ricoprire ambedue i ruoli, di transfuga e di testimone. Singolare personaggio, spettatore immobile, condannato a una forzata esclusione che potrebbe vincere con un atto di coraggio e di volontà, teme la vita, ne ha paura; tutta la sua vicenda biografica è una storia di auto-esclusioni, di assenze partecipative (fino alla finale testimonianza negativa al processo), paura non fisica, ma essenziale, psicologica della vita. Ma anche paura che nasce dalla consapevolezza della tragedia, dall’impossibilità di accettare lo spaventoso (Dolfi 2003, 24—25).

6

The betrayal perpetrated by the adaptation of Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini in Vittorio De Sica’s 1970 film was made famous by Bassani “Il giardino tradito” (Bassani 1998, 1255—1265).

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Pino Barilari is given the assignment of playing the roles of both defector and witness. A unique character, an immobile spectator, condemned to a forced exclusion, who could win with an act of courage and will, fears life; his biography is a history of self-exclusions and voluntary absences (until the final negative testimony at the trial), a fear of life that is not physical, but essential and psychological. But also a fear that is born from the awareness of tragedy, the impossibility of accepting the frightful.

This variation can be measured by starting from the different possible descriptions of Barilari: either as a spectator, a defector, and a witness; or as a subject who is immobile, a witness, and guilty. To this effect, Bassani affirms: Il film di Vancini, che si chiama La lunga notte del ’43, è bello soprattutto nella rappresentazione oggettiva del massacro in piazza: rappresentazione bella perché vera, non inventata. Il mio racconto tuttavia è diverso. Parla, oltre che del massacro in piazza, della vicenda di Pino Barilari, il protagonista. Lui, e consiste in ciò la sua tragedia, non può non essere insieme ai massacratori, dalla parte loro. Ecco, perché, rispondendo al giudice, dichiara: “dormivo” (Gagliardi 1988, 63). Vancini’s film, entitled La lunga notte del ’43, is especially beautiful in its objective representation of the massacre in the piazza; it is beautiful because it is true, not invented. Still, my story is different. Besides the massacre in the piazza, it speaks of the incident with Pino Barilari, the protagonist. He cannot but be with the massacrers, on their side, and therein lies his tragedy. This is why, answering the judge, he declares, “I was sleeping.”

First, let us consider the immobility of the gaze. In the film, as in the story, the character of Barilari is presented as static. Watching, while seated at the window, is his only occupation. But the theme of immobility is carried out by Vancini differently than in the text, in a way that does not contemplate the figure of the ill pharmacist. The idea of a fixed, immobile gaze is primarily achieved in the framing of the film, composed of a prologue—the credits—that present a gallery of thirteen photographs of the salient moments of Italian participation in the war, accompanied by captions, and a juxtaposed epilogue dated May 6, 1959, just before the release of the film. There is neither a prologue nor an epilogue in the novel, which begins with “the image of the pharmacist facing the window of the apartment upstairs” and ends with Anna’s commemoration of that terrible night of betrayal and death. Thus, the fixity of the gaze is proposed by Vancini according to two modalities that are not associated with the character, but rather with a gaze that is omniscient and external to the

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story. On one hand, the informative, documentary photographs of the prologue freeze History in a carousel of fixed images, as a pure, anaesthetized document. On the other hand, the final sequence of the film, set in a sunny Ferrara, recounting the return of Franco with his foreign wife and their young son to Franco’s native city to visit the tomb of his father, with an unwitting handshake between victim and torturer, seals the confusion, and even paralysis, of History. The Bassanian immobility sheds its subjectivity itself in Vancini’s film and becomes a metaphor, inflected in the modes of the imagination, of social and collective inertia, maintaining the night of December 15, 1943 as part of the long night that stretches from 1940 to 1959. In the second instance, the gaze is witness. The variation is evident and deeply-rooted in the adopted narrative strategy. Bassani states: Con tutto rispetto per il film di Vancini, senza dubbio interessante, i cui intenti sono soltanto parzialmente quelli del mio racconto, debbo dire che manca, nel film, il corrispondente cinematografico dello strumento linguistico di cui mi servo per stringere da vicino la realtà: il cosiddetto discorso libero-indiretto (Varese 9). With all due respect for Vancini’s film, doubtlessly interesting, whose intents are only partially those of my story, I must say that the film lacks a cinematographic equivalent of the linguistic instrument that allowed me to hold that reality close: the so-called “free indirect discourse.”

The story makes extensive use of free indirect discourse, a modality that allows Bassani, in this case as well, to develop that walled-off proximity between the narrator-character and characters.7 The narrator’s alterity is made up of similarity: the narrator is physically in the same place as his characters while contemporaneously situated in a separate existential space, as if on the other side of a sheet of glass. Many passages betray this discrepancy between the story and the film, and one in particular comes to mind. Vancini decides to utilize a clear point-of-view shot attributed to Barilari to describe the massacre of the eleven Jews. It happens under the gaze of Pino, who is positioned beyond the shutters of his window. It is not so, however, in Bassani. Immaginavano. Penetravano, immaginando, dentro l’appartamento che sovrastava la farmacia […].Immaginavano anche il resto, naturalmente, tutto quanto il 7

On the subject of the relationship between narrator and characters in Bassani’s work, see Dolfi 2003, 11—72.

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Modes of adaptation in La lunga notte del ’43 resto.Vedevano gli undici uomini allineati in tre gruppi distinti contro la spalletta della Fossa del Castello […] e Pino Barilari, infine, che soltanto il grido dell’avvocato Fano era riuscito a strappare all’ultimo momento del suo duro sonno di ragazzo, appiattato lassù, tremante sulle sue grucce, dietro le lastre della finestra che sovrastava la scena… E questo così, per mesi e mesi, per tutto il tempo che occorse alla guerra, dal dicembre del ’43 al maggio del ’45, per risalire adagio la penisola italiana: come se l’immaginazione collettiva avesse bisogno di ritornare sempre là, a quella notte tremenda, e di riavere uno per uno dinanzi agli occhi i voti degli undici fucilati quali nel punto supremo il solo Pino Barilari li aveva avuti (Bassani 1998, 196—197). They imagined all sorts of things. The interior of the apartment over the pharmacy, first of all […]. The rest, too, was imagined, naturally; to the very end, down to the slightest detail. The eleven men lined up in three separate groups against the parapet of the Castle’s moat […] and Pino Barilari, finally, torn from his deep, childish sleep only at the last minute by Lawyer Fano’s shout, crouched up there, trembling on his crutches, behind the panes of the window, overlooking the scene… And thus, for months and months, for the duration of the war, from December ’43 to May ’45, to move slowly up the whole peninsula. As if the collective imagination—just as one, to punish oneself, occasionally presses an ill-healed wound to make it bleed—was constantly forced back there, to that terrible night, to see again, one by one, the eleven murdered men’s faces, which, at the supreme moment, only the eyes of Pino Barilari had been able to see (Bassani 1971, 188, 190—191).

The massacre does not take place, but rather it is experienced by an impersonal figure—a plural third-person narrator who imagines it. It does not happen under the witness’s gaze, but the existence of that gaze renders everyone a potential witness. What might Pino Barilari have seen that night? What could he have seen if he were there? Vancini chooses, instead, to present the character as the definite and sole witness, while Bassani poses the character as simple vehicle for the sentiment of the other characters’ testimonies. Naturally, in the film, the use of the point-of-view shot also makes the spectator, through Barilari, a witness. But the rift is caused by the fact that the spectator, together with the character, sees the occurrence exactly as it happens, while the residents of Ferrara who are evoked in the text, along with all of Bassani’s readers, imagine that they are seeing, always returning there, trying to adhere (without succeeding) to the probable gaze of the one who (perhaps) has seen the massacre. The gaze is, finally, responsible. “Arrivò il turno di Pino Barilari. Sempre sorretto dalla moglie…” [Pino Barilari’s turn came. Still supported

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by his wife…]8. The man is called to testify, or rather to assume a specific responsibility, he who is presumably the only one able to give, presumably, the version of how things really went. But for Bassani’s Barilari, “le visioni sono spaventose, ma anche la vita è spaventosa” [Visions are frightful, but life is frightful, too].9 and thus the man operates that dissociation between sight and intellect with a probable obliterating negation of the occurrence. Vancini radically modifies this: Barilari remains forever trapped in his own small rooms, he does not testify, and first he is attacked by his wife, who, while confessing her own betrayal, accuses him of being a coward because he does not bring charges against the assassins (though he saw them), and then he is blackmailed by Sciagura, who reminds him of their youthful camaraderie and promises him, in return for his pledge of silence, imminent rescue. Pino responds by saying, “Dormivamo” [We were asleep], thus providing an alibi for his wife as well. Vancini’s film chooses to dramatize the choice of the gaze that relieves Pino of responsibility in these two sequences, making Barilari a victim of others’ bullying. The sense of blame that floods the Bassanian 8

“Sempre sorretto dalla moglie, si fece avanti e giurò regolarmente, seppure in soffio. Ma un attimo prima, che rispondendo alla domanda del Presidente, pronunciasse con chiarezza, quasi scandendola, quell’unica parola: ‘Dormivo’, che di colpo, come la puntura di uno spillo in una vescica gonfia d’aria, aveva risolto in nulla l’enorme tensione generale (il silenzio era assoluto, nessuno respirava, e anche la moglie si era curvata ansiosa in avanti a scrutargli il viso), proprio in quell’attimo da parte di parecchi fu veduto distintamente Sciagura rivolgere a Pino Barilari qualcosa come una rapida smorfia propiziatoria. E un ammicco, già, un quasi impercettibile ammicco d’intesa,” (Bassani 1998, 204). [Still supported by his wife, he moved forward. He took the oath, normally, though in a whisper. But before he could answer the President’s question and utter, clearly, as if spelling them out, those three words: ‘I was asleep,’ which suddenly, like a pin pricking a blister filled with air, dissolved the general tension into nothing; just when, a moment before opening his mouth, the paralytic had cast his widened eyes all around (the silence was absolute, nobody was breathing; even Pino’s wife, at his side, had bent over anxiously to peer at his face): at that very moment, from his corner, Nino Bottecchiari had distinctly seen Sciagura address to Pino Barilari— the only person, in Ferrara, who perhaps knew, the one witness on whom his freedom and, perhaps his life now depended—something like a rapid, furtive, propitiatory grimace; and a wink, yes, an imperceptible, conspiratorial wink] (Bassani 1971, 197). 9 A Chekhov reference opens the 1956 version, and was then omitted from successive versions, though it is of undoubted interest: “Che devo dirvi, le visioni sono spaventose, ma anche la vita è spaventosa. Io, mio caro, non capisco la vita e ne ho paura” [What can I say to you? Visions are frightful, but life is frightful, too. I, my dear friend, do not understand life, and it frightens me] (Bassani 1971, 161).

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character is missing in Vancini’s film, as is the negation of responsibility “al pari di una rimozione traumatica: quanto si ripete in lui è simile alla negazione della coscienza, che verifica l’impedimento all’accettazione conoscitiva di una realtà per altro investigata dall’alto febbrilmente ogni giorno” [as a traumatic repression: that which repeats itself in him is similar to the negation of conscience, which verifies the impediment to cognitive acceptance of a reality otherwise feverishly investigated from above every day] (Dolfi 2003, 25). In Vancini, for Pino to deny that he has seen, though the spectator knows that he saw, represents only a just response to the evil of the world, whereas for Bassani that denial is a sign of profound defeat.

4. Opening the door to the 1960s Bassani, Vancini, and Pasolini had already met in the summer of 1954, in the months that saw the textual birth of “Una notte del ’43.” The occasion of this meeting was the writing of the screenplay for Mario Soldati’s La donna del fiume. Bassani brought in Pasolini to write the dialogue, thus offering him his first opportunity to work in film, and Vancini was called in as a consultant because of his experience with locations along the river Po, having documentaries like Tre canne un soldo and Uomini soli under his belt.10 That is another story, which I have partially tackled elsewhere11. I return to it here because the work that the three fine-tuned in the preceding years with respect to the river’s landscape endures in the images of Vancini’s film, which dedicates particular visual respect to the scenes set on the banks of the Po. Elsewhere, I have noted the desire to construct a small story for images of an “aquatic landscape” that takes its cue from the film Ossessione and runs 10

Regarding his work on La donna del fiume, Vancini recounts: “Mi trovai dentro questa operazione proprio grazie ai miei documentari. Ricordo che spesso Soldati, mentre facevamo dei sopralluoghi, mi chiedeva dove avevo girato una determinata scena e io ce lo conducevo perché lui era deciso ad ambientare in quel posto una particolare sequenza. Insomma mi ritrovai quasi consulente” [I found myself a part of this operation thanks to my documentaries. I remember that, while we did surveys, Soldati often asked me where I had filmed a certain scene and I would take him there because he was resolved to film a particular sequence in that place]. (Faldini and Fofi n.d., 174—175). 11 This exploratory hypothesis was advanced in a recent presentation for a seminar on Italian-French co-productions of the 1950s (Paris, Univ. Nouvelle Sorbonne, April 4, 2008) and warrants further research: Villa, “Coprodurre un’immagine italiana. Il caso de La donna del fiume (M. Soldati, 1954)”.

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through the whole of the 1950s, but that which emerges from this composition of sequences is the recursion to prominent figures who established its emergence, with Pasolini and Bassani among them. And as with La donna del fiume, the two found themselves imagining and then creating the long sequence of the hide-and-seek game on the bank, a small film within a film.12 In this way, Pasolini, in sharp contrast to the other screenwriter, Ennio De Concini13, wants to open a fluvial parenthesis in the film La lunga notte del ‘43, developing the scene of the lovers’ bicycle ride by Franco and Anna along the banks. In sharp, luminous contrast, the sequence pierces the dark claustrophobia of the rest of the film, introducing an off-white photograph, and again, as in the other river sequences, empty, without horizons, where flatness and confusion become stylistic code. This sequence becomes contemporaneously an extraneous body in the film, different and anomalous, but also an echo of the story that Italian cinema carries within during that decade poured into the film as something that runs parallel to it. But let us return to the rifts. Vancini’s film was released the following year, along with the films Il generale della Rovere by Roberto Rossellini and La grande guerra [The Great War] by Mario Monicelli, which both won the Leone d’oro [Golden Lion] award at the Venice Film Festival. These films returned to the recent past, inverting the documentary or memorial, neo-realistic, tendencies of earlier reflections on the war, and toning down the heroism of characters, instead introducing morally ambiguous characters that at times are even scoundrels. Moreover, 1960, the year that opened the decade, saw the release of three important films: Rocco e i suoi fratelli by Luchino Visconti, La dolce vita by Federico Fellini and L’avventura by Michelangelo Antonioni. The three films constitute a system, while asserting the natural affiliation of the three directorial personalities due to their poetic sensibilities and creative paths, inasmuch as they work in the same discursive framework that makes of the “language of crisis” a sort of programmatic manifesto. The trauma that these three films bring into discourse is the common one of apparent 12

I refer to the sequence in which children play hide-and-seek on the banks of the Po and little Tunin, the son of the protagonist, gets lost. The sequence was conceived, written, and executed by Bassani and Pasolini. 13 The film’s screenwriting problems are often attributed to the problematic understanding between Concini and Pasolini. The latter increasingly implied that he wrote scenes which were never filmed because Concini opposed them. See Pasolini 1996, 71—74. For a critical bibliography regarding Vancini’s film, with direct reference to the screenwriting process, see: Argentieri 1989-1990); Aristarco 1962, 224—228; and Verdone 1960, 13—15.

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neocapitalistic integration, the short consolidation of the economic boom for an industrially advanced society, a trauma that gets expressed through a definitive capitulation to ethical conscience for Fellini, existential conscience for Antonioni, and sociopolitical conscience for Visconti. The temporariness turns out to be the cipher of the language common to the three films: aborted paths, aimless journeys, and trips without endings are resolved with a contained chapter structure (Rocco), the installation of an unresolved mosaic (La dolce vita), and a quest with no hope of success (L’avventura).14 Additionally, between 1949 and 1960 there was a flourishing of new Italian cinematic talent. Besides Vancini, these directors included: Elio Petri, Marco Ferreri, Ermanno Olmi, Bernardo Bertolucci, Giuliano Montaldo, Vittorio De Seta, and Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. All of these directors propose forms for revisiting the past, a return to themes omitted or put to rest during the 1950s, but addressed without ideological prejudices, according to a more elastic moral perspective, nurturing a detachment, at times ironic-grotesque while poetic-sentimental at others, from that which has been. The films of the early Sixties thus exhibit a new attitude toward the character, especially the character that acts as representative of the story of the recent past: the idea of temporariness, the impossibility of drawing real finishing lines, is reflected in the ambiguity, inefficacy, and cowardice of the characters. It is the beginning of a portraiture made up of masks that are ineffective and echolalic, revealing their monstrosity for the rest of the decade. Vancini’s film (cor)responds to this contemporary landscape. Let us return to Pino Barilari, immobile, a witness, and guilty. Vancini distances himself from Bassani by staging this type of spectatorship. The immobility of the gaze adapts its form to the immobilismo of History, a sign of the paralysis of the collective conscience, of the state of cramped progress, that stretching the story in the long path from 1949 to 1960, ends up turning back on itself without positing a solution for the future. On the other hand, testimony and guiltiness are no longer themes that, through the character, reflect on the narrator and subsequently the reader, as in Bassani. They are themes that exist only in the short story, sunken into the purely diegetic dimension, as the motor and mechanism for the events. The loss of free indirect discourse, the presentation of the massacre within view, and the testimony provided by the sum of several dramatic scenes, make of Vancini’s Barilari a character—a unique character, but a character nevertheless. The spectator can identify with Barilari nor see him- or herself in him. The other characters, precisely because they are not very 14

For analysis of the three films, see: Villa 2006, 43—49. See also Micciché 1995.

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heroic, but rather ambiguous and cowardly figures—examples include Franco, whose pusillanimity is emphasized by Vancini, as well as Sciagura, the cruel Fascist who carries within his character his own opposite since the role was played by Gino Cervi while he was still known for his role as Peppone15—are not the type of figures with whom the reader might relate, as offered in Bassani’s gallery of characters. Vancini’s characters function totally in service to the film, trapped in the solid frame of the story, ossified as they repeat senseless gestures or give atrocious commands almost jokingly. Thus “Una notte del ’43” became a 1960 film whose gaze offers point-of-view shots of a character who falsely demonstrates a personification of death. Translated by Monica Hanna

Works Cited Argentieri, Mino. 1989-1990. I fantasmi della storia. La scena e lo schermo II, 3—4. Aristarco, Guido. 1962. La lunga notte del ’43. In Il mestiere del critico. Milan: Mursia, 224—228. Baldelli, Ignazio. 1965. Varianti di prosatori contemporanei (Palazzeschi, Cecchi, Bassani, Cassola, Testori). Florence: Le Monnier. —. 1974. La riscrittura “totale” di un’opera: da “Le storie ferraresi” a “Dentro le mura” di Bassani. Lettere italiane 2: 180—197. Bassani, Giorgio. 1998. Opere. Milano: Mondadori. —. 1971. A Night in ’43. Five Stories of Ferrara. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Brunetta, Gian Piero. 1979. Storia del cinema italiano. Vol. 4. Rome: Editori Riuniti.

15

“Compaiono più fascisti in camicia nera nel cinema dei primi anni Sessanta che in tutto il cinema del ventennio e lo sguardo si spinge oltre i riti e i miti di facile ridicolizzazione, fino al tentativo di ricomporre una fenomenologia di comportamenti comuni e quotidiani. La borghesia italiana può finalmente rivedersi in vesti fasciste e ridere di sé stessa, ritenendosi definitivamente assolta dalle colpe passate” [More Fascists in black shirt appear in films of the early Sixties than in all of the films of the twenty years of Fascism and the gaze pushes beyond the rites and myths of facile ridicule, towards the attempt to recompose a phenomenology of common, everyday behaviors. The Italian bourgeois can finally see itself in Fascist clothing and laugh at itself, considering itself definitively absolved of past sins] (Brunetta 1979, 197).

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Dolfi, Anna. 2003. Giorgio Bassani. Una scrittura della malinconia. Rome: Bulzoni. —. 1981. Le forme del sentimento. Prosa e poesia in Giorgio Bassani. Padua: Liviana. —. 1980. Tre interviste sul tempo: Bassani, Bilenchi, Bonsanti. Contesto 4. Gagliardi, Antonio, ed. 1988. Giorgio Bassani lo scrittore e i suoi testi. Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica. Haller, Hermann. 1977. Da “Le storie ferraresi” al “Romanzo di Ferrara:” varianti nell’opera di Bassani. Canadian Journal of Italian Studies 1, 1: 74—96. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Micciché, Lino. 1995. Cinema italiano: gli anni ’60 e oltre. Venice: Marsilio. Moestrup, Jørn. 1981. Giorgio Bassani: Dal racconto al romanzo. Il Veltro 25, 1/3: 231—138. Naremore, James, ed. 2000. Film Adaptation. London: The Athlone Press. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 1996. I film degli altri. Parma: Guanda. Sanders, Julie and Alessandra Raengo, ed. 2004. A Companion to Literature and Film. Oxford: Blackwell. Sanders, Julie and Alessandra Raengo, eds. 2005. Literature and Film. Oxford: Blackwell. Sanders, Julie. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation (The New Critical Idiom). New York: Routledge. Stam, Robert. 2005. Literature Through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation. Oxford: Blackwell. Vancini, Florestano. 1993. Una premessa del regista. In La lunga notte del ’43 by Ennio De Concini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Florestano Vancini. Ferrara: Liberty House. Verdone, Mario. 1960. Una mostra così. Bianco e Nero 8/9: 13—15. Villa, Federica. 2000. La scrittura per la visione. A partire da quattro adattamenti del cinema italiano degli anni Cinquanta. La Valle dell’Eden 4. —. 2006. Oltre la semiotica. In Metodologie di analisi del film, ed. Paolo Berretto, 43—49. Bari-Rome: Laterza. Welsh James M. and Peter Ley, ed. 2007. The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

SECTION 4: STRATEGIES OF TRANSLATION

BEYOND THE FIGURATIVE: THE DESERT OF THE TARTARS BETWEEN LITERATURE AND FILM NICOLA DUSI, UNIVERSITY OF MODENA AND REGGIO EMILIA

The Desert of the Tartars, between Buzzati and Zurlini Much has been written about the fiction of Dino Buzzati,1 but only recently has the dearth of criticism on the films of Valerio Zurlini been addressed.2 Here we will look at the criticism of the era in which the works of Buzzati and Zurlini were executed and at more recent criticism of the works of the novelist and the filmmaker. However, what will interest us is not the verification of the system of the social discourses of the source text and the target text, nor will we make an historical reconstruction of the context that informs the production and reception of the texts, which would be to follow an historical and sociological approach. Instead we will examine the internal mechanisms of the texts themselves, the literary narrative and the film, in order to reopen the discussion and to examine the contextual configurations understood as an enlarged macro-text, i.e., an inter-textual system of co-texts.3 This essay will follow a socio-semiotic method of uncovering the “translational aspect,” or the play of relations, in the micro-mechanical textual treatments as we move from one medium to the other at the various textual or inter-textual levels. We will concentrate on the transposition of the best known novel by Buzzati, Il deserto dei Tartari [the desert of the Tartars] (1940), into Zurlini’s film version of the same title, made in 1971, the final film of Zurlini’s career, considered by some “to miss the mark” and by others to

1

See Fanelli 1900, and Nella 1992. See Achilli and Casadio 2001, Miccichè 2000, and Brunetta1993. 3 See Casetti 2002; Vanoye 2000, and Eugeni 2004. 2

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be “superior to the novel.”4 In our opinion, the Zurlini film functions, in translational terms, not only on a discursive, enunciative level, given that it assumes a narrative method and a tonality very close to those of Buzzati, but also as a kind of thematic re-opening and important up-dating. While the film takes into account the romantic and decadent world of the novel, it also brings the work politically up-to-date, demonstrating the critical aspect latent in the novel, which may have perhaps passed unnoticed. In a novel, space, light, noises, and forms of the world present themselves as figurative elements. They may also, however, construct a singular system—along with the narrative rhythm, the methods of telling the story, and the affective dimension or better, “the anxiety”—that permits a reading “in filigree” that textual semiotics calls figural.5 Our challenge here is to verify how such a textual strategy transforms itself into a filmic version in specific malleable, discursive, and enunciative ways, and to show how these elements put the novel and the universal sense of the film into a translational relationship at various levels. To do this, we will investigate some hypotheses that we will briefly list as follows: 1. The most perturbing part of Buzzati’s writing, defined as “magic realism’ because of the fantastic or metaphysical subtext of the novel, is not lost in the realistic linearization that Zurlini makes of it in the film. Rather the magic realism survives and works beneath the surface at a second level of reading of the film. Above all, is tied to those aspects apparently marginal and less strictly figurative. 2. These aspects of the film have a kind of “common ground” with Buzzati's poetic, in his love of the visual arts and, in particular, of metaphysical painting. 3. The filmic transposition of Il deserto dei Tartari re-opens the textual dynamics of the novel at its affective and rhythmic levels. It works as a “re-semantization” of the meanings and tensions in the source text, through new interpretations and the attention the film gives to the “target culture,” i.e. different from the “source culture” of the novel. This accomplished, the film seems to present a coherent attempt to achieve a network of “equivalents” with the novel, while it inscribes itself into the poetic and stylistic world of the director. 4

This is the position of Sineux 1977. For the notion of the figural, we draw on the definitions of Fontanille 1995, as quite different from the psychoanalytical one of Jean-Francois Lyotard.

5

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The Themes of Buzzati Buzzati published Il deserto dei Tartari in 1940, as the third novel in a series at Rizzoli Press, directed by Leo Longanesi, just prior to Italy’s entrance into World War II. As a writer, Buzzati had already found his own “stylistic code” with a realism that overlapped the fantastic and the fable-like in his works Barbabò delle montagne [Barnabò of the mountains] (1933) and, two years later, Il segreto del bosco vecchio [the secret of the old forest].6 He was also interested in the fantastic romantic art of Caspar David Friedrich, Eugéne Delacroix, Gustave Doré, and Jean;Auguste Ingres as well as the metaphysical surrealism of Giorgio De Chirico, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Paul Delvaux, and Yves Tanguy, but in a manner, according to Marcello Carlino, “neutralized and deideologized as if fleeing the graphic estrangement and the social polemics of Goya and Grosz” (Carlino 1976, 19). During these early days, Buzzati worked first and foremost as a journalist for Il Corriere della Sera. He was not yet known as a painterillustrator, poet or a playwright. The first collection of his brilliant short stories did not come out until after the war. At least two of these stories, however, offer interpretations of the feeling of impotent waiting that pervades both Buzzati’s Il deserto dei Tartari and Franz Kafka’s The Castle. As Buzzati himself has confirmed, the first story hypothesizes a symbolic representation of his youthful years spent in the editorial offices of the Corriere, in the daily routine of work with a feeling of life and hope sliding uselessly by. The other story depicts Italy on the edge of worldwide conflict, with intellectuals like Buzzati disengaged from their political obligations, overcome by a feeling of powerlessness. However, it seems these stories were not much read nor deemed important. For Buzzati, the critics’ comparisons of him with Kafka were often taken as a negative mark, relegating him to the role of imitator. In our opinion, however, Buzzati’s position with respect to The Castle can better be employed as a guide to the reading of Il deserto dei Tartari. In addition, Buzzati’s novel allows us to glimpse other interpretive hypotheses. In the story about the life of the young officer, Giovanni Drogo, the “anti-heroic hero” (as Eugenio Montale would put it), we discover a lucid description of the hollow ideal permeating military rhetoric as well as its defining power relationships. The novel also depicts the more general variation of modes of uneasiness around the waiting and 6

The Secret of the Old Forest was brought to the screen by Ermanno Olmi in 1993, and Barnabò of the Mountains by Mario Brenta in 1994.

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the sense of death, the unawareness of the passing of time, and the realization of nothingness. Furthermore, in Buzzati’s work, there are almost obsessively recurring themes, nourished by the Unheimlich, of the “disturbing” that is part of the very definition of the fantastic. For Freud, it is “that sort of terrifying element that rises up . . . in that what is familiar to us” (Farnetti 2000).7 In this analysis, we will follow the path of Buzzati’s magic realism, departing from the definition of Maria Corti: “le pagine di Buzzati emanano [...] una sorta di strana radiazione: vi sono offerte di accadimenti, ma l'atteso non accadrà. Tipico Il deserto dei Tartari; inquietante, si sa, è la cifra del fantastico e Sartre diceva a proposito di Kafka e di Blanchot: l'uomo normale è precisamente l'essere fantastico” [From Buzzati’s pages emanate (…) a kind of strange radiation. Events are proffered but the wait for them never concludes. Typical and disquieting is the figure of the fantastic that one recognizes in Il deserto dei Tartari. As Sartre used to say about Kafka and Blanchot: the normal man is precisely the fantastic being](Corti 2000, 417).8

Drogo in the Doctor’s Office: The Creation of the Mystery Let us now proceed to a close analysis, departing once again from the novel as our starting point, in order to take up the theme of the “visionary” quality in Buzzati as well as the “spell” of the fortress. Four months have passed since Giovanni Drogo arrived at Fort Bastiani. Almost immediately a sense of disillusion had set in, in place of his initial curiosity about the fortress, the desert, and the frontier, guided by a principle of reality that Drogo seems never to abandon in his reasoning.. Through Drogo, the omniscient narrator informs us at the beginning of Chapter IX: “It seemed like yesterday [that he had arrived], and yet time had slipped away with its unvarying rhythm, no slower for the happy man nor quicker for the unlucky ones of the world. Another three months had passed—passed neither slowly nor quickly” (Buzzati 2005, 52). During this period of time, immobile in the all-consuming daily rituals, Drogo does, however, finally obtain the possibility of leaving, by making arrangements for a certificate with the military doctor that would allow him to transfer without dishonor. Yet something carries him in a different direction. In the novel, we are present at his first “fall into illusion,” as if a disease or a malady were taking hold of him: It is his 7 8

See also Todorov 1970. See also Caspar 1990.

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fascination with the fortress that overcomes him exactly at the moment of choice, making him relinquish his previous desire to leave. Let us consider Giovanni Drogo at his meeting with the doctor. Drogo enters the office unannounced and finds the doctor seated at his worktable, immobile. He does not appear to be doing anything. The passage describing the beginning of the scene is as follows: The window looked out on to the courtyard from which there rose the sound of regular pacing to and fro because it was evening already and the changing of the guard was about to begin. From the window one caught sight of a part of the outer wall and the extraordinarily serene sky. The two officers saluted and Giovanni Drogo quickly saw that the doctor was fully informed of his case (Buzzati 2005, 53).

Here we are apparently dealing with a description conducted at the level of quiet realism, typical of the omniscient narrator of Il deserto dei Tartari. However, let’s break down the passage into its various components. The narrator’s gaze is positioned from the interior and high up; the window acts as a frame; and the courtyard is outside, below. From the courtyard a sound of “regular pacing” arises. The idea of calmness and order is produced by this human-generated sound. We will re-discover this element again toward the end of Drogo’s meeting with the doctor, but the sound will change to that of a trumpet whose notes rise, expand, and create emotion. The sense of temporality in the passage is marked precisely by the phrase “it was evening already,” and time is established within the daily rhythm of the routine of the barracks “the changing of the guard.” The gaze is shifted to frame “a part of the outer wall” and then climbs to take in “the extraordinarily serene sky.” Thus a space is defined in its “vertical dimension” (low/high) through the positioned, objective gaze of the narrator—a gaze that also takes into account distance and the relationship of “inclusion/exclusion” (inside/outside). The period of twilight, however, provides a condition of luminosity that contrasts with the sky. The contrast is, perhaps, a warning sign for the reader, a sign of excess, no matter how banal and reassuring the use of the adverb “extraordinarily” may be. Now we may jump ahead to the brief dialogue Drogo has with the doctor. It is conducted as a kind of skirmish between an initial, ostentatious show of complicity and the actual institutional distance implicit in the bureaucratic formalities that must be carried out (the doctor “made him give his name and surname which he wrote in the prescribed place on the form according to the regulations” (Buzzati 2005, 53). Then we have the following description:

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Instead of sitting down Giovanni had gone over to the window and every now and then looked down on the soldiers drawn up on the white snow. The sun had barely set; a blue shadow had spread over the walls. “After three or four months, more than half of you people want to get away,” the doctor was saying with a certain sadness in his voice; he too was now wrapped in shadow so that it was difficult to see how he could write. “If I could have my time again I would do the same. Yet it’s a pity.” Drogo listened without interest, so intent was he on looking from the window. Then he seemed to see the yellowing walls of the courtyard rise up into the crystal sky, with above them, higher still, solitary towers, crooked battlements crowned with snow, airy outworks and redoubts which he had never seen before. A bright light from the west still illuminated them and thus they shone with an inscrutable life. Never before had Drogo noticed that the Fort was so complicated and immense. At an almost incredible height he saw a window – or perhaps a loophole open onto the valley. Up there must be men whom he did not know – perhaps even an officer himself with whom he could be friends. In the abyss between bastion and bastion he saw geometrical shadows, frail bridges suspended among the rooftops, strange postern gates barred and flush with the walls, ancient machicolations now blocked up, long rooftrees curved with the years. Against the dark blue background of the courtyard he saw in the light of the lanterns and torches soldiers of great height and proud bearing underneath their bayonets. On the brightness of the snow they formed black, immobile files, as if made of iron. They were very beautiful to see and stood like stone while a trumpet began to sound. The blasts spread through the air, gleaming and alive, and struck straight into the heart . Down in the courtyard the trumpet was calling, the pure sound of brass and human voice together. It shook once more, warlike and dashing. When it fell silent it left even in the doctor’s office an enchantment no words could describe. The silence became such that you could hear someone’s long pace crunch on the frozen snow. The colonel had come down in person to take the salute. Three trumpet calls of extraordinary beauty cleft the sky (Buzzati, 54—55). KEY: We employ italics for expressions of emotion (affects) and synesthesia; boldface for chromatic representations; boldface italics for forms and figures (eidetic and topological categories); and underlining for perceptual and cognitive expressions of the gaze.

In the subjective vision of Drogo, everything assumes the cognitive outlines of a grandiose and aesthetically pleasing hallucination. It is difficult for readers to decipher whether something is part of Drogo’s “mental” constructions, i.e., in more cinematographic terms, something that exists only in Drogo’s thoughts, one of his private visions, a

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hallucination, a daydream, or rather something the narrator believes to be a part of Drogo’s acute sensibility to know and to be able to “catch a glimpse” of things. This “indecipherable” mode, embedded in a narrative that constantly tries to reassure readers of its realism, produces an effect that we will call “suspended time” or a “temporal fault,” to quote Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson, (Deleuze 1983) where real figures and virtual, potential ones live side-by-side, somewhat suggesting the possibility of “another world.” Here we can point to the Tartars themselves who might become mysterious and almost extraterrestrial beings, close to the evocative figures in Buzzati’s short stories, in his illustrations, or on his canvases. Such figures exist in a world that the subject “sees and feels” so intensely that the subject makes the world “incredible.” We propose this textual mechanism as a possible definition of “magic realism,” that same oxymoron discussed by Maria Corti concerning 20th century Italian literature. She asserts that such writing is a “un reale prodotto da una visione [...] sostituisce delle leggi del reale; incarnazioni del fantastico, ma trattate realisticamente” [true product of a vision […] that substitutes for the laws of the real: incarnations of the fantastic that are, however, treated realistically]. According to Corti, a writer of such fiction, whether it be “nouveau roman” or “neo-realism,” always creates “una realtà seconda, portatrice di un linguaggio secondo; cioè la crea a livello sia tematico che formale” [a second reality, a carrier of a second language, that is, he creates a new reality at a level that is either thematic or formal] (Corti 2000, 412). We shall now carry out a detailed investigation of how such “magic realism” functions in the literary fragment quoted above. As a guide, we can extrapolate from the narrative some lines embodying figurative, thematic, and valorized concepts, along with some elements of the gaze. As we have noted earlier, Drogo looks from above, down onto what is below. This is an omniscient point of view that allows him to see without being seen, like a “voyeur,” and to enjoy some of the spatial symmetries and chromatic contrasts provided by the movements of the soldiers (the black ranks of the soldiers “drawn up on the white snow”) and by the play of the light from the setting sun on the fortress (“a blue shadow . . . spread over the walls”). The discipline of the changing of the guard becomes a conveyor of a “martial” order and precision. In close ranks, the soldiers are a compact and earthbound element compared with the diffusion and airiness of the light and the blue shadow that, as if free from chains, transfigure the fortress in the sense of opening up the figures, the surroundings, and the associative possibilities.

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Then Drogo looks up higher, following the chromatic diffusion of color (“the yellowing walls”), and it is at this point in the passage where realistic description shifts into a fantastic, visionary mode (“he seemed to see”) that develops isotopes of airiness (“airy outworks and redoubts”) and of diffusion in terms of elongation (“above them, higher still, solitary towers”). The “bright light from the west” renders the objects on which his gaze rests precious and fragile. Drogo re-evaluates the objects in supernatural terms, in contrast to the human world of the courtyard below (“the crystal sky […] crooked battlements crowned with snow […] shone with an inscrutable life”) (Buzzati 2005, 54). In terms of the thematic isotope of ordinary/extraordinary or, we might say, human/superhuman (or even supernatural), the narrative focuses first on Drogo and his desire to identify with a sense of community (“even an officer himself with whom he could be friends”), and then it moves to the fortress itself, already defined as “complicated and immense.” Now the fortress becomes an ancient, mythic place, at once attractive and repelling, a spatial isotope of verticality and diffusion in its multiplicity of “geometrical shadows” and its “abyss between bastion and bastion.” There are “frail bridges suspended along the rooftops . . . [and] long roof-trees curved with the years.” Such forms in space, “at an almost incredible height,” assume a brooding, menacing aspect. The image of “strange postern gates barred and flushed with the walls” offers a sense of enclosure or boundary, but also possesses a protective connotation for those within the fortress—a protection from an unknown external world. When Drogo’s gaze descends again to the courtyard, he has altered his affective values and his conjecturing. His mind has moved away from the distraction of his initial purpose—to get the transfer document—to a kind of attentiveness. It is an attentiveness born of, looking outside, that becomes a stupor, a fascination (“never before had Drogo noticed”) and an almost nostalgic curiosity. Drogo is a subject who has achieved a moment of “aesthetic fusion,” a perceptual and affective fusion,9 with the fortress and all it represents in its fateful landscape, linked with glorious attributes. The transformation that takes place at this moment will mark Drogo forever. Even if he returns, again and again, to the notion of leaving, he will never be able to take such a decisive step. Now that his cognitive perceptions have become enflamed or affected, he cannot see anything other than heroic transformations (“soldiers of great height and proud bearing […] immobile files as if made of iron”). Although the gaze is directed downward, it is always fixed on the vertical axis. By now Drogo 9

See Greimas 1987.

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has exalted the gaze into a kind of ecstasy of the senses: the soldiers appear “very beautiful to see,” and the sound of the trumpet materializes, expands, and gains color in blasts “gleaming and alive” that seem to consecrate Drogo’s decision (“they struck straight into the heart”). The sound of the silver trumpet of the fortress rises from below to merge with the fantastic visions Drogo has already seen in the diffused area above. The mythical aspect that has permeated the novel since the first chapters, here becomes incarnate, a call to destiny, and sanctions the transformation of our hero.10 The human and the superhuman (or supernatural) unite in “the pure sound of brass and human voice together.” In this way, the mystery pieced together by Drogo passes effortlessly into a validation of everything connected with the fortress. A rhetoric of intensity confounds “warlike and dashing” with “very beautiful to see” and “enchantment.” Toward the end of the chapter, Drogo hardly listens to the discourse of the doctor, who is compiling the documents that would permit Drogo to leave. Fascination with the fantastic visions and the promises of glory has taken hold of him. The fortress, light and expanding ever upward, is compared to the city, weighted down by rain and noise, and contrasted with the city’s dusty roofs. Only by staying at the fortress can Drogo explore the sense of fatality that has captured him, as a part of the spell of the fortress.

Il deserto dei Tartari of Valerio Zurlini As Zurlini recounts in his long interview with Jean Gili, the first person who wanted to film Il deserto dei Tartari was Michelangelo Antonioni, followed by Vittorio Gassman and others (Gili 1976). In France, Jacques Perrin was also very interested in the project. The screenplay underwent various writings and rewritings, including a draft by Jorge Semprun, before it reached the version by Andre` Brunelin that was, in turn, converted into a shooting script by Jean-Louis Bertucelli. This last collaborator on Zurlini’s film, Bertucelli, worked in close collaboration with Brunelin on the final découpage. According to Zurlini, Buzzati himself described Drogo and the other characters in an article written some years after the novel’s publication, in terms that no director would ever accept for a film. Buzzati wrote: Mi hanno proposto di adattare per lo schermo Il deserto dei Tartari. Io vorrei che ogni personaggio avesse una uniforme differente, le più belle 10

See Greimas 1984.

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della storia, dai moschettieri di Dumas fino agli Ulani di Balaclava, ognuno vestito a modo suo. Se penso a Drogo, l'immagino con una uniforme asburgica e con un bel cavallo nero lucente (Gili 1976, 58). They proposed that I adapt Il deserto dei Tartari for the screen. I wanted every character to wear a different uniform, the most beautiful uniforms in history, from the musketeers of Dumas to the Ulanians of Balaclava, each dressed in his own style. If I think about Drogo, I picture him in a Hapsburg uniform, mounted on a beautiful black, shining horse.

Analyzing the relationship between the book and the film, Paolo Vecchi points to the slow pace of the film, also a stylistic trademark of Buzzati, along with the sense of “waiting” that every gesture seems to evoke in Zurlini’s films in general: “prima dell'azione, qualunque essa sia, troviamo sempre una cadenza meditativa (a volte, addirittura, la plastica immobilità dei personaggi), una cautela gravida di sospensione e, talvolta, di incanto” [Before the action, whatever it may be, we always find a meditative cadence—at times, even a plastic immobility of the characters—a grave indicator of suspense and, at times, of enchantment] (Vecchi 2001, 58). For Vecchi, Zurlini’s choice of environment and costumes for Il deserto dei Tartari was motivated by a kind of cinéma vérité that places the story in a middle-European setting, during the decadence of the Hapsburg Empire in the years preceding the outbreak of World War I (but something never stated in the film). Vecchi states: “tempo e spazio del dolore vengono dilatati a una dimensione metaforica” [time and a space of sorrowfulness are expanded into a metaphoric dimension] (Vecchi 2001, 58). This time and space, in fact, provoke some interesting inter-textual hypotheses, introducing both spatial and chromatic contrasts into the problem of the lighting, which we will address in our analysis.

Drogo and Uncertainty We will not engage in a detailed comparison of the scene in the doctor’s office in the film with its equivalent in the novel already discussed. In Zurlini’s film, everything that happens in the doctor’s office is resolved in a very fast and friendly manner, with no reference to the dreamlike unrest of Drogo, or to his gaze through the window in the novel. Instead, Drogo’s decision not to depart is presented through a series of moments of negative “valorization” performed by various characters, either verbally or through muted glances. Above all else, we should note that in the doctor’s scene in the film, the doctor introduces a new theme.

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the notion of a rare disease perhaps trapped within the walls of the fortress. The doctor pours out his thoughts on its illusiveness to Drogo: “Even the specialists in the capital weren’t able to find a cure.”11 Then, in response to Drogo’s question about why he does not request a transfer, the doctor states, “I could, of course, […] but I’d feel like a deserter.” Later, along similar lines, Captain Ortiz mocks Drogo by recounting to him his vision of the Tartars eighteen years earlier and claiming to have remained at the fortress to await their return. Finally, there comes the moment when Drogo chooses not to submit the doctor’s letter of transfer to the general, who has arrived to inspect the fortress and, thereby, chooses to remain. In the film, we should emphasize here the importance of a brief series of descriptive shots that precedes the scene of Drogo’s choice. An establishing shot, an indicator of the omniscient narrator, shows the exterior of the fortress from an objective and distant vantage point. The wind slowly grows in intensity; the desert fills with a fog and swirling dust. The howling wind and the increases in density of the fog and dust envelope the fortress until finally, a jump-cut changes the scene—always from an objective point of view—and takes us to the interior of the fortress, into the warm and protected officers’ dining room. All of the officers are decked out in dress uniform and lined up to receive the general. While an awkward Drogo holds an envelope in his hand, those near him scrutinize him warily in a series of alternating close-ups. While Drogo surrenders to a fascination that stems from the mysteriousness of the fortress, one that also originates from the mistshrouded frontier of the desert, both of which are recounted in Buzzati’s novel, in the pages preceding the scene of Drogo’s meeting with the doctor, in the film it is rather the force of social constriction that overcomes Drogo’s wish to leave. The explicit play of glances exchanged between Drogo, Ortiz, and the other officers, just before the general arrives and stands in front of Drogo, makes him feel frozen by the social pressure. They are glances of reproach or resigned disbelief. In Drogo’s decision not to hand over the letter, we may feel he achieves a kind of silent solidarity with the monde maudit of the officers who have, by now, come to exist apart from all others, estranged from the city and from life outside the fortress. Regardless of rank, all of the officers seem well aware of the injustice they have submitted to, compared with the situation of those in the “real world,” conscious of being wasted in the emptiness of waiting, but at the same time unable to leave. A slightly repentant Drogo 11

Translators’ note: all quotations from the film are from the subtitles of the following DVD: Valerio Zurlini, dir. The Desert of the Tartars. Italy, 1976. Noshame, 2006.

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changes his intention, as he does also in the doctor’s office in the novel. Here, however, Drogo’s decision of not handing over the transfer letter almost seems to be a reaction to the accusatory silence of the others, who are prepared to brand him a “deserter” of their shared ideals in the presence of the general. This sequence allows us to clarify a basic hypothesis about the kind of cinematographic adaptation Zurlini wished to accomplish. Buzzati’s novel was to become a story of humanity at its moment of truth, perhaps less powerful than the novel in its imaginative aspects, nevertheless functioning well as a narrative that draws the spectator in as an accomplice. Zurlini seems to follow the lesson of Antonioni, “the first to bring film discourse into the interior of characters and hence no longer permitting the spectator to trust only the reality that he sees” (Vecchi 2001, 67). As Zurlini explains in his book of reflections, The Years of the Lost Images, it is a matter of recounting doubt and humanity without inventions or tricks so that “truth” comes “always from the characters, from the investigation of their hopes and anxieties, from a belief in them” (Vecchi 2001, 67). Nevertheless, in the search for psychological realism, something also happens in figurative terms. At the beginning of the sequence under discussion, the fortress, shot from the exterior, seems well defined. Then we hear the chants of the soldiers at Easter mass in the distance. Little by little, everything becomes foggy and out of focus. There is a play with partial invisibility that serves as a transition device between the scenes of the sequence, as we pass from exterior to interior. Perhaps this play is a way of presenting another kind of gaze, with respect to the “usual” gaze, but it also serves to “give voice” to the desert, making it take on the role of opponent in the narrative. The wind aids the process by making space, form, and objects more dynamic. In yet another way, the play of infocus/out-of-focus, the visible and the invisible, functions as a sign or an “indication” of Buzzati’s various transfigurations in his novel.

Figuration/De-figuration: Death in the Whiteness The second sequence of the film under consideration concerns the mission outside the fortress, to mark the state boundaries in the mountains, before the task can be carried out by a delegation from the rival army. For several days Drogo and his fellow soldiers have watched the enemy with an enthusiasm rooted in misunderstanding. The commandant of the fortress, however, condemns this enthusiasm as infantile. There will be no war, but merely an act of pure frontier bureaucracy. Nevertheless, a

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platoon of soldiers is dispatched toward the high peaks, with a mixture of patriotism and a sense of competition with the enemy. Major Maggi is assigned the command of the expedition, and Drogo and Lieutenant Almerling are to serve under him. Almerling, decked out in full dress uniform, appears visibly weakened by consumption. According to the novel, this mission constitutes an ever-growing disaster culminating in the death of Almerling. In the film, however, we do not see Almerling’s demise. It takes place during a dramatic elision in the narrative. We only learn about the death in sequences that follow, in one that opens with a shot of a black coffin being transported in a two-wheeled military caisson, and later still, in one of a meeting in the city Drogo has with the general, who requests clarification of the event. In our analysis, we are only interested in one scene toward the end of the sequence, the scene that begins with a column of soldiers marching into the thick fog and the snowstorm. At last they stop to set up camp; a few of them will press on farther to the heights above them. Almerling is a volunteer among this latter group. Shortly before departing, Almerling bids Drogo farewell, with great emotion, as if this leave taking will be their last encounter. However, Drogo responds less emotionally, nevertheless allowing his gaze to follow Almerling as he moves out, perhaps in apprehension of the fate to befall his friend. After this, there occurs a series of brief shots, forming a kind of subscene, which begins with a few subjective point-of-view shots and then gives way to more omniscient, wide-angle shots which include Drogo within the frame. As the small squadron sets off into the wind and snow, it lacks a “martial” appearance. The soldiers seem to be just a group of people struggling to remain upright through force of will, or because ordered to do so by their superiors. Their salute to the flag before the departure also seems difficult and pointless. In his light, parade-dress uniform, Almerling displays his suicidal death-wish even more clearly than before. The unique moment of humanity, in the scene, is the final leave-taking, discussed earlier, between Almerling and Drogo, even if Drogo does not seem to grasp the full gravity of the situation. At the remarkable conclusion of the scene, the squadron of “heroes” moves farther away into the whiteness of the snow and then disappears altogether into the snowstorm and the fog. Here, we may say that a sense of honor and patriotism is depicted in all its ephemeral and tragic essence, as the soldiers, in a long take, become black shapes who grow cloudy and indistinct until they are nothing more than opaque splashes on the monochromatic and rippling screen The frame comes to resemble an enormous painting by Alberto Burri, or perhaps the disappearing forms

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come to resemble the stylized and rarified figures by Giorgio Morandi. Through the use of plastic markers (chromatic ones in this case), Zurlini’s somewhat cryptic “mannerist” screen presentation gives us the sense of a work of art in process. This sense seems “tactile” rather than “optical,” according to Deleuze’s distinction between the two terms in his discussion of tactile-optical art (Deleuze 1981, 206). There is a kind of dissipation of form created by the (human) figures that go out of focus, lose form, and disappear. This dissipation can be examined on two levels: the figurative and the figural. Here we will go into the implications of both. First, however, we must consider what Umberto Eco calls instructions for reading directed at the spectator on the primary level (Eco 1990). This level shows the event from Drogo’s point of view and from that of the omniscient narrator. The filmic apparatus guides us through a “denotative” and “referential” gaze: the soldiers advance into nothingness, given that for those who have remained behind, the snow and the wind render them obfuscated. Certainly the soldiers who move out are fatigued and go on the mission against all common sense. This might suffice for us to declare their gesture “heroic,” or at least, it may seem to be an attempt to overturn logical expectation. However, on the next level, the figurative one, the implications are different. The forms dissipate and resonate with each other, as if to equal each other. Their identities are lost. We no longer know whether the forms are human. In fact, what is there in the representation of a (human) figure, captured in the open, in torment, other than our will to watch and remain within the narrative? Finally, beyond a superficial reading of the film at the primary level and above the figurative level, we discover the figural.12 This is a level of tensive and plastic elements. The screen is no longer a conveyor of a narrative with characters, spaces, and time, but rather becomes a topological space, a frame of light and shadow, sound and noises, forms or surroundings, and movement. In short, the audio-visual image returns to its plastic and expressive dimensions, opening itself to the substances of film that precedes form. The image also opens a path into the imaginary. Gradually, we cease to look at a squadron of soldiers; rather we discern threads (or shapeless forms) vibrating against a dirty white, pulsating background. This pictorial mode, or better, “painted effect” puts the image on a new sensual level.13 12

Here we consider the term figural to be in constant tension, in filigree, with the figurative, after the propositions of Greimas 1984, 36—38, and Deleuze 1983, 6— 12. 13 See Costa 2002.

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Furthermore, the painted effect is intertwined with a figural rhythm created by opposing plastic categories in space, such as the forms of distant/near, open/closed, or dispersed/defined, by contrasting chromatic categories involving black versus white, a contrast which, in turn, becomes one of saturated/unsaturated, and by contrasts of light and visibility within the landscape from the well-defined to the out of focus, or from an in-focus image to one that is opaque and unreadable. Thus, a new “connotative” meaning is superimposed on the simpler “denotative” one. It is a signification constructed on the expressive level of the film, where plastic contrasts rhyme with and merge with the elements of content. It is here that we discover, above all, the powerful categories of life and death, presence and absence. Finally, what does the film say to us in this sequence? First of all, there is the story of a suicide/homicide carried out in the name of an empire in rapid and inexorable decline, under the guise of the honor and dignity of an élite though dying aristocracy, of which Almerling is a member. As Roland Barthes has taught us, every ideology has its own rhetoric (Barthes 1957, 3—7). Moreover, there is a second and deeper aspect. In Drogo’s gaze and that of the spectator who looks on with him as Drogo watches the soldiers disappear in the snow, as well as in the montage that follows the sequence, which compares the calm of the night with the silence of the fortress, its rituals, and its routines, we discover a “connotative” discourse on the loss of the self that assigns meaning to our choices. The film recaptures and constructs a profound theme of mystery and indeterminacy. The theme is embodied in the fascination Drogo and many of the officers feel for the desert spread out before the fortress. The source of this fascination goes beyond the usual issues of courage in matters of life and death. Instead, categories of dispersion/closure within the continuity of forms, of colors that blend together, and of the discontinuity of figures and luminous as well as of luminous and chromatic contrasts, all point to the question of the legibility of the world and our ability to comprehend it. Therefore, what emerges from the sequence is a sense of incompleteness and of unknowableness in the face of the unknown. The mystery of the fog-shrouded horizon of the empty and extended landscape, scrutinized by Drogo and his fellow soldiers throughout both novel and film, is the source of the fascination of Il deserto dei Tartari. The men stare at the horizon with a mixture of devotion, insistence, desperation, and disillusionment. A vertical plane of mountains circumscribes the vast horizontal space of the desert. These mountains, in

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turn, give a chilling sense of menace to that boundary from which the men await either the glory of battle, or the appearance of a defining reality. We know that the mysterious Tartars will never come. The desert is, in fact, the emptiness that invites or precedes the leap toward the unknown, toward the elsewhere or the alternative possibility. Indeed, Zurlini has pointed out, in an interview, that the adversaries in the final confrontation in Buzzati’s novel, the purveyors of a tardy, useless realization of desire, is not the Tartars at all, but rather the “truppe del nord” [troops from the North] (Gili 1976, 39). The myth remains intact. The mystery preserved.

The Gradualness of the Transfiguration We have concentrated our efforts on the de-figuring or defacement of the soldiers in the snowstorm as well as on the fortress assaulted by wind and fog. We could also have considered the solitude of individual characters within the immense space of the desert and mountains, particularly Drogo, when he arrives at the fortress near the beginning of the film or focused on Captain Ortiz when he commits suicide, in the distance standing with his back to us, in the emptiness within the frame. We could have recalled variations of light playing on the jagged immobility of objects, or on the poses of men such as they occur in the episode of the soldiers’ “silent protest.” We could have discussed the stylization of landscape and the figures within it, or the use of chromatic demarcations of brown and black that remind us of such Italian metaphysical painters as Morandi, De Chirico, and Mario Sironi. However, the path we have followed through the snowstorms, the fog, and the desert, through the immobility and the silences, allows us to discover how Zurlini, in his film, has recreated an aesthetic of emptiness and of boundary, between desert and wall-like mountains. Apparently more faithful to thematic developments than to metaphysical suggestions in the novel, Zurlini has, in fact, transfigured and reproduced the basic aesthetic of Buzzati’s writing. We can now define the aesthetic as spiritual realism. In Zurlini’s film, this spiritual realism has become his means of translating the sense of the unknown, the mystery, and the enchantment in Buzzati’s prose. Translated by June and John Stubbs

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Works Consulted Achilli, Alberto and Gianfranco Casadio, ed. 2001. Elogio della malinconia. Ravenna: Girasole. Barthes, Roland. 1957. Mythologies. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Bazin, André. 1951. “Journal d’un curé de campagne” et la stilistique de Robert Bresson. Cahiers du Cinéma 3: 12. Brunetta, Gian Piero. 1993. Storia del cinema italiano 1960-1993. Vol 4. Rome: Editori Riuniti. Calabrese, Omar. 2000. Lo strano caso dell’equivalenza imperfetta (modeste osservazioni sulla traduzione intersemiotica). Versus 85/87: 101—20. Carlino, Marcello. 1976. Come leggere “Il deserto dei tartari” di Dino Buzzati. Milan: Mursia. Casetti, Francesco. 2002. Cinema, letteratura e circuito dei discorsi sociali. In Cinema e letteratura. Percorsi di confine, ed. Ivelisa Perniola, 21— 31. Venice: Marsilio. Caspar, Marie Hélène. 1990. Fantastique et mythe personnel dans l’oeuvre de Dino Buzzati. La Garenne-Colombes: Erasme. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture. Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Corti, Maria. Reale e realismi. In Letteratura italiana del Novecento: Bilancio di un secolo, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa, 411—421. Turin: Einaudi. Costa, Antonio. 2002. Il cinema e le arti visive. Turin: Einaudi. Deleuze, Gilles. 1983. Cinéma I. L’Image-mouvement. Paris: Minuit. —. 1981. Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation. Paris: La différence. Devoto, Giacomo and Giancarlo Oli. 1990. Dizionario della lingua italiana. Florence: Le Monnier. Dusi, Nicola. 2003. Il cinema come traduzione. Da un medium all’altro: letteratura, cinema, pittura. Turin: UTET. Eco, Umberto. 2003 Dire quasi la stessa cosa. Esperienze di traduzione. Milan: Bompiani. —. 2001. Experiences in Translation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. —. 1990. I limiti dell’interpretazione. Milan: Bompiani. —. 1979. The Role of the Reader: Exploration in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Eugeni, Ruggero. 2004. The Lateral Glance. From Boito to Visconti: The Structure of Vision in the Incipit of “Senso.” IRIS 30: 99—102.

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Fabbri, Paolo. 2000. Due parole sul trasporre. Versus 85/87: 271—84. Fanelli, Giuseppe. 1990. Dino Buzzati. Bibliografia della critica, 19331989. Urbino: Quattroventi. Farnetti, Monica. 2000. Scritture del fantastico. In Letteratura italiana del Novecento: Bilancio di un secolo, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa, 382—409. Turin: Einaudi. Fontanille, Jacques. 1995. Sémiotique du visible. Des mondes de lumière. Paris: PUF. Giannetto, Nella, ed. 1992. Il pianeta Buzzati. Milan: Mondadori. Gili, Juan. 1976. Entretien avec Zurlini. Ecran 76: 58—60. Greimas, A. J. and Joseph Courtés. 1979. Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du language. Paris: Hachette. Greimas, A. J. 1987. De l’imperfection. Périgueux: Pierre Fanlac. —. 1984. Sémiotique figurative et sémiotique plastique. Actes Sémiotiques Documents 60. Jakobson, Roman. 1959. On Linguistic Aspects of Translation. In On Translation, ed. Reuben A. Brower, 232—239. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Jost, François. 1987. L’œil-caméra. Entre film et roman. Lyon: PUL. Lotman,Yuri 1977. The dynamic model of a semiotic system, Semiotica 21: 193—210. Lotman,Yuri. 1985. O semiosfere. Trudy po znakovym sistemam 17: 5— 23. —. 1993. Kul’tura i Vzryv. Moscow: Gnosis. Metz, Christian. 1991. L’énonciation impersonelle ou le site du film. Paris: Klincksieck. Miccichè, Lino, ed. 2000. La prima notte di quiete di Valerio Zurlini: un viaggio ai limiti del giorno. Turin: Lindau. Sineux, Michel. 1977. “Le désert des Tartares.” Positif 190: 70—71. Todorov, Tzvetan. Introduction à la Littérature fantastique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Vanoye, François. 2000. De l’adaptation d’un texte littéraire au cinéma. Versus 85/87: 143—153; Vecchi, Paolo. 2001. Tra vuoto e nulla: Appunti su “Il deserto dei Tartari.” In Elogio della malinconia, ed. Alberto Achilli and Gianfranco Casadio, 55—60. Ravenna: Girasole.

FASCISM FROM STAGE TO SCREEN: FILM ADAPTATIONS OF SHAKESPEARE’S THE TAMING OF THE SHREW AND PAOLA RICCORA’S SARÀ STATO GIOVANNINO JACQUELINE REICH, STONY BROOK UNIVERSITY Unlike other social issues, Fascism’s position with respect to the family was never one that sparked much debate amongst the party’s various factions. The regime came to define the family as a public institution, subject to state intervention and government initiatives and laws (Caldwell 1986). In this fusion of the private with the political lies the Fascist harmonious ideal of an authoritarian state joined with a revived patriarchal, authoritarian family. This reaffirmation of familial accord was intended to counter, among other things, the perceived crisis of the family and family values, attributed to, among other causes, the transformation of the family from producer (based on the agricultural model) to consumer (in the modern, industrial age) and the growing independence of women (Meldoni 1975). In this configuration, the woman was subsumed into the patriarchal and political order. Her loyalty was to the Father as well as to the Fatherland, to the family as well as to the state. This rhetorical emphasis on the family found its political counterpart in the regime’s demographic policies. Almost immediately after the consolidation of its power, Mussolini and his government implemented various initiatives intended to increase both the number of marriages and the birthrate among Italian citizens. The regime appealed to patriotism, imperialism, colonialism, and racism as a means of justifying its demographic policies. More workers were needed to increase national production; more soldiers were needed to fight its battles; more citizens were needed to inhabit and govern its colonies; and more Italians overall were needed to bring glory to the third Roman Empire. Moreover, in this particular area of state intervention, the Fascist government had an extremely important ally: the Catholic Church. For the historian Leslie Caldwell, demographic politics are inseparable from the Catholic

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tradition’s “continuing, even obsessive” tendency to view women biologically and socially as “reproducers and nurturers” (Caldwell 1986, 115). The regime’s demographic politics played an integral part in its deliberate attempt to construct gender roles and to reinforce its own power over the general populace. Fascism aimed to control both male and female sexuality, “absorb and tame” new sexual attitudes, and create a passionless sexuality of its own in its quest to create norms of respectability (Mosse 1985, 10). The prestige of the fatherland was tied to the Fascist image of Italy as a virile, productive and reproductive nation, and Italian men and women had to conform to respective gender roles in order to achieve this goal. Masculinity was directly linked to sexual prowess and fecundity, femininity to the predestined call of motherhood. These directives for women were funneled exclusively into the institutions of marriage and motherhood, and a woman’s role as dutiful wife was the first phase in securing her correct place in the social and sexual economy of Fascist Italy. Thus, the preoccupation with marriage and the family had three aims: 1) to increase the population and hence glorify the nation; 2) to eliminate the division between the public and the private; 3) to further confine women to the domestic sphere as de-eroticized mothers. In order to accelerate the process, the regime instituted a series of restrictions as well as incentives aimed at both men and women, devised to make marriage easier, more appealing and financially rewarding. In January 1927, the “celibacy” or “bachelor” tax levied fines on all unmarried men between the ages of 26 and 65. In 1929, the state lowered both the age limits for marriage, with or without parental consent. Under the new policy, a girl had to be only fourteen years of age to marry (down from fifteen) and eighteen (down from twenty-one) to marry without parental permission; for a boy, the respective ages were sixteen (from eighteen) and twenty-one (from twenty-five) (De Grazia 1992). In 1931, a law passed banning all homosexual acts. Legislation and propaganda intensified in the mid-1930s with increased government intervention in the private sphere. In an article entitled “Matrimoni giovani” [Young Marriages] in the September 15, 1934 issue of Il Popolo d’Italia, Mussolini encouraged Italians to marry at an early age in the service of the state (Mussolini 1958, 332). Elaborate mass weddings were staged. The government issued low- or no-interest loans to newlyweds, and married men were given preferences with regard to hirings, raises, and promotions. In many ways, however, the regime’s plans backfired. First, there are no concrete data that the number of marriages increased during the

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ventennio. The family also remained in essence separate from public life, creating what Victoria De Grazia calls an “oppositional familism:” during Fascism, contrary to government initiatives, the family functioned more “as a refuge against political intrusions rather than as a pillar of the state” (De Grazia 1992, 115). For Turin’s working-class women, for example, the intervals women took between having children grew longer and longer. They would wait or have fewer children to, in the words of one worker, “spite Mussolini.”1 This evidence points to the fact that during the Fascist period women often took control of their bodies, despite government attempts to wrestle that power away from them. A quote by Giuditta Rissone, a famous stage and screen actress (and Vittorio De Sica’s first wife) offering advice in the popular press on how to be a good wife, provides an excellent view of the contradictions at work in Fascist policy concerning women and marriage: Una buona moglie è colei che al momento opportuno sa non vedere, che permette all’uomo di sentirsi ancora qualche volta scapolo, che non chiede conto delle ore trascorse fuori casa, che quando ha dei dubbi li nasconde, che cede anche quando sa di aver ragione, che ascolta i consigli del marito anche quando è più intelligente di lui (Mafai 1976, 30). A good wife is one who at the opportune moment knows not to look, who allows her husband to still feel and behave like a bachelor at times, who does not ask what he does when he is not at home, who when she has doubts hides them, who gives in even when she knows she is right, and who listens to his advice even when she is smarter than he is.

This is an interesting citation for several reasons: 1) it connects the glamorous entertainment world with the mundane and average citizen; 2) it acknowledges the fact that marriage is a constant negotiating process, full of apprehension, disputes, and conflict; and 3) its wording reveals that it is the woman who is the more intelligent one and who controls her own behavior, painting the portrait of an egotistical, stubborn, and at times imbecilic husband. The use of the active voice places the emphasis on the wife’s conscious decision-making rather than on her presumed subservience. The selection of the word “ascoltare” [listen] to her 1

This idea of personal and private choices as potential acts of resistance and subversive behavior in response to the regime’s demographic policies is amply illustrated in Luisa Passerini’s evocative study of working-class Turin’s experiences and memories of Fascism. See in particular Luisa Passerini’s chapter on “Resistance to demographic policy,” in Passerini 1987, 150—182. Consult as well De Grazia 1992, 45—52.

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husband’s advice rather than “seguire” [follow] is another key to this passage’s subversive meaning. Finally it is interesting to note that absolutely nothing is mentioned about marriage and its role in service to the state, nor does the wife’s role as mother garner any notice. The light-hearted and satirical tone of Rissone’s advice rings true for many of the films during the Fascist era that have marriage as their main theme. Most texts which deal with “creating the couple,” to appropriate the title of Virginia Wright Wexman’s study on love and marriage in Hollywood cinema, are comedies which end happily in a matrimonial union (Wright Wexman 1993). Sometimes, as Stanley Cavell has observed, it is a comedy of remarriage, as in Nunzio Malasomma’s Dopo divorzieremo (1937), in which an estranged couple is brought back together again (Cavell, 1981). In either case, however, it is not an easy journey, and on the humorous path to romantic and familial “enlightenment” many conflicts about marriage and family life come to the forefront. Film comedy in general, and in particular the American screwball comedy upon which many of these films were modeled, is the quintessential genre for working through many of these social problems. Through humor, these films were able to ridicule various social conventions while diffusing their social criticism in laughter. Comedy has a long-standing tradition of social satire in Italy, dating from the theatrical commedia dell’arte of the Renaissance. The escapist production of the Fascist period presents an interesting case, given the fact that the government played an important role in film production during the era. While seemingly aligned with the regime in reconciling, according to Vito Zagarrio, the “irreconcilable,” these comedies nevertheless reveal the “conflictual elements” in Fascist society which were becoming increasingly harder to reconcile (Zagarrio 1991, 279). One such area of conflict was marriage and family life. Clothed in farce, these films mock the union deemed sanctimonious and patriotic by the church and state through their humorous plots based on traditional comic situations (mistaken identities and character manipulations). This is especially the case in two theatrical adaptations: one classical and the other contemporary—Raffaello Matarazzo’s Sono stato io! [It was I] (1938), adapted from the Neapolitan playwright Paola Riccora’s popular comedy, Sarà stato Giovannino [It must have Been Giovannino’s Fault] (1933), and Ferdinando Maria Poggioli’s modernized incarnation of Shakespeare’s La bisbetica domata [The Taming of the Shrew] (1942). In both films marriage is something to be avoided at all costs; it requires the conversion of a wayward and obstinate soul, who even then is reluctant to

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enter into matrimony. Although imbued in the comic, theatrical tradition (of Neapolitan regionalism and Elizabethan England, respectively) what makes these films unique to the Fascist period is their ideological baggage. In the guise of comedy and framed by an ideologically safe happy-end, these films deride what the regime considered to be an extremely serious and important aspect of its political agenda. Marriage and the family receive insightful treatment in Raffaello Matarazzo’s Sono stato io! Starring Eduardo, Peppino, and Titina De Filippo in a reprisal of their theatrical roles, tells the story of Giovannino (Eduardo), who, having lost his job, is taken in by his brother’s family, consisting of his bossy sister-in-law Donna Rosa (Titina), his henpecked brother, a womanizing and conniving son Carlo (Peppino), and a rebellious young daughter Lauretta (a very young Alida Valli). Good natured and easily confused, Giovannino is manipulated by his niece and nephew for their own purposes: Lauretta to spend time with her boyfriend and Carlo to seduce a beautiful showgirl. In each of these cases, it is Giovannino who receives the blame in the eyes of the domineering Donna Rosa for her children’s misbehavior. Relegated to the kitchen, Giovannino finds a sympathetic friend in Lisa, the family’s good-hearted, “adopted” daughter (presumably an orphan, she had been taken in and raised by the family), now consigned to the role of domestic servant. When Lisa, seduced and later abandoned by Carlo for a wealthy young heiress, learns that she is pregnant, Giovannino, fed up with Carlo’s selfish behavior, claims responsibility, repeatedly uttering “Sono stato io!” in a manic delirium. His self-sacrifice and Lisa’s state of desperation force Carlo to become accountable for his actions. The film ends with a long shot of Carlo and Lisa embracing on the beach where Lisa had gone to literally drown her sorrows. Sono stato io!’s social criticism of marriage and family is deeply rooted in the Neapolitan theatrical tradition. Originally based on the commedia dell’arte, Neapolitan theater in the seventeenth and eighteenth century thrived on the commedia pulcinellesca or pulcinellate, that is an improvisation with the figure of Pulcinella, the lazy, opportunist, gossipy petty thief, at the center of the story. By the mid-nineteenth century, comedy and drama began to examine the problems unique to Neapolitan society (poverty, corruption, etc.) under the guidance of such figures as Eduardo Scarpetta (the De Filippos’ father), with his satires of the Neapolitan bourgeoisie and its vices through the character of Felice Sciosciammocca; Federico Stella (1819-1891), with his theater aimed at the poor and working class; and Salvatore Di Giacomo (1860-1934), with his popular dramas and melodramas influenced by the naturalists and the

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veristi. The De Filippos, playwrights as well as actors with their own repertory company, carried on and expanded this tradition, using comedy not only as a way of satirizing and criticizing but also as a way of reforming Neapolitan society (Antonucci 1980, Viviani 1969). By rooting the film adaptation in the Neapolitan theater, the filmmakers make reference to a tradition steeped in linguistic dialect (here in standard Italian, since use of dialect in the cinema was strictly forbidden by the regime), satire, and social critique. Sarà stato Giovannino, was part of the De Filippo repertoire. This pleasant comedy offers a criticism of rather than an escape from contemporary Italian society. At its heart is a condemnation of a bourgeois family overly concerned with social status and lacking emotional warmth. The narrative is significant for another reason—it emanates from a unique source: Paola Riccora (born Emilia Capriolo), the most successful (and one of the very few) female playwrights who worked during the Fascist period. The author of several popular comedies, she wrote in both Neapolitan dialect and standard Italian. First performed in Naples, Sarà stato Giovannino went on to tour all around the country, bringing national recognition to both the playwright and the actors.2 In a review dated 28 March 1934, it prompted the prominent theater critic Renato Simoni of Corriere della sera to call it “una amena parodia di vita domestica” [a pleasant parody of domestic life], complete with stereotypical characters out of the Neapolitan tradition: the emancipated daughter, the egotistical, hypocritical son, the weak father, and the feared mother (Simoni 1955, 128—129). The film, in both the text and the extracinematic discourse, deliberately played off the popularity of both the play and the De Filippos, placing it deeper in the anti-establishment tradition of Neapolitan theater. The opening titles read “Sono stato io! Versione cinematografica della commedia Sarà stato Giovannino! di Paola Riccora,” followed in the next screen by “Protagonisti: Edoardo, Peppino, e Titina De Filippo.” One advertisement from the popular magazine Lo schermo (1937) features the trio’s heads as they peer out from in between a stage curtain: the reference to their theatrical fame promotes “i migliori De Filippo nel migliore dei film” [The best of the De Filippos in the best of films]. The interaction of the play’s stereotypical characters and the comic acting talents of the De Filippos, when interpreted in the context of Fascist society, brings some interesting, potentially subversive elements in the text to light. The film counters many ideological constructs propagated by the 2

Riccora enjoyed continued success throughout the ventennio; another play, Fine mese [The End of the Month] (1937), was adapted to the screen by Matarazzo as Giorno di nozze [Wedding Day] (1942).

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regime, specifically in relation to gender roles as defined by the patriarchal family at the base of the regime’s moral and political discourse. The representation of the family and marriage that emerges in the film is quite contrary to the regime’s authoritarian ideal. The children constantly subvert parental authority, which is decidedly matriarchal rather than patriarchal. Marriage itself appears as a means of economic exchange, a way of securing and improving the family’s social status in the upperbourgeoisie. Carlo, the devout bachelor, makes a mockery of matrimony, falsely professing a willingness to marry only in order to have his way with a beautiful young chorus girl. His self-proclaimed motto is “Io sono come la farfalla. Sai che cosa fa la farfalla? Sugge e vola!” [I am like a butterfly. Do you know what a butterfly does? It sucks out, and it flies away!]. The obligatory epiphany, in which Carlo sees the moral error of his ways and presumably pledges his love to Lisa, is rushed and unconvincing. The film’s conclusion, when Giovannino takes the moral burden of the family’s transgressions onto his shoulders, is perfunctory, particularly in comparison to the play. One contemporary film reviewer called it “assolutamente mancata” [absolutely unsuccessful] and “scialbo e scolorito” [expressionless and dull] (Falconi 1937). Thus, the male subject’s conversion to proper alliance with patriarchal ideology appears to be more a concession to generic obligations that require a happy end than the heartfelt realization that concludes Riccora’s play. Reluctance to enter into marriage, here exemplified in Carlo’s behavior, is not limited to male characters in the cinema of the Fascist period. Catina (Lilia Silvi) of Poggioli’s 1942 film La bisbetica domata [The Taming of the Shrew], a modernized version of the Shakespeare original, must be kidnapped, tricked, and connived into marrying Pietro (Amedeo Nazzari). Perhaps not coincidentally, in a period when cinema tried to make the spectator forget the horrors taking place outside the theater, this film contains one of the few allusions to the war. Pietro, on his return to Rome after a long absence, notices (as does the spectator through his eyes) how the city has “changed.” In addition, the characters at one point gather in a bomb shelter during an air-raid alarm, where, for their enjoyment, a theater company continues their performance of Addio, giovinezza, a play which Poggioli himself had adapted into a film the previous year (Ambrosino 1991, Argentieri 1998, Reich 2002). These deliberate referents to a disturbing extra-cinematic reality, much like the realistic iconography in Poggioli’s previous Sissignora (1941), make the film’s discourse with respect to marriage all the more recognizable to those spectators in the audience. Here the recourse is also to the original play, whose realistic bourgeois ambiance, in the words of Coppélia Kahn,

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is the proper setting for social commentary on the constructed nature of marriage, gender, and the social order (Kahn 1988). For Kahn, Shakespeare’s play satirizes the male urge to control women by showing that patriarchal authority is authenticated by female subjugation to it, in this case Kate’s seemingly complete devotion and submission to Petruchio’s will. However, given the irony rampant in her long final soliloquy and other textual clues, Kate, while apparently surrendering her autonomy to her new husband, nevertheless retains her intellectual freedom. For Marianne L. Novy the importance of Kate’s final speech is paramount: “If hierarchical societies perpetuate their structures by the roles each new generation learns to play, Kate’s performance is a dramatically heightened version of the kind of compromise that keeps such a society going” (Novy 1988, 24). Since in the public sphere Kate merely plays a role as dutiful wife, the play literally “plays” with the very notion of “play” itself. This idea of playing a part in the social order, reinforced by the many self-reflexive elements in the drama, further heightens the divide between the public and the private, or between appearance and reality. For many Italian citizens during the Fascist period, the private, and the family in particular, became a form of resistance against the public domain. Thus, Poggioli’s adaptation of a play that openly addresses the oppositional nature of these two arenas takes on a unique resonance for ideological imposition of gender roles in the Fascist order. Just as in the original, Catina’s epiphany in the film does not involve blind submission to the patriarchal order. This Catina’s final soliloquy takes the form of a light-hearted song, which on the surface seems to reinforce the dominant ideological stance on female subordination: Capricciose e mezze pazze, quasi tutte ne sono un po’, queste scettiche ragazze, che ti sanno dire solo di no! Ci sarebbe qualche cosa per cambiarle? Sì! Una buona medicina per guarirle? Sì! Qualche mezzo convincente per calmarle? Sì! Un marito e un bastone lì per lì! E poi quando sono sposate, Non le riconosci più, Le bisbetiche domate Sono sposine piene di virtù. Whimsical and half crazy, They all are a little bit so,

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Fascism from Stage to Screen These skeptical girls who only know how to say no! Could there be something to change them? Yes! A good medicine to cure them? Yes! Some convincing means to calm them? Yes! A husband and a stick on the spot! And when they are married, You won’t recognize them anymore, The tamed shrews Are little brides full of virtue!

Yet the song’s significance permeates deeper than its banal lyrics. The musicality of the verse, coupled with the repetitive structures and emphatic statements, serve to heighten the playfulness and ironic undertones of the lyrics. The series of three questions is sung with an anxious tension reflecting the tenuous nature of the responses. Unlike the play, however, Catina prefaces her song with a declaration in direct address to the audience, which underscores the idea that Catina only assumes the role of “little wife full of virtue” rather than accepts it whole-heartedly as dogma. Lilia Silvi as Catina, in a close-up facing into the camera, explains: “Bisogna essere mansuete e dolci, remissive e rassegnate, pazienti ed ubbidienti, se si vuole ottenere qualche cosa da questi uomini che noi amiamo” [We women must be meek and sweet, submissive and resigned, patient and obedient, if we want to get something out of these men that we love]. Catina publicly assumes the docile position advocated by the (regime’s) patriarchal politics. However, by openly acknowledging that it is a part she plays to satisfy her own, not her husband’s (or patriarchal society’s) desires, her freedom and power are maintained even within the confining constructs of the institution of marriage. This idea of the impossibility of female submission emanates in the guise of the secondary female character of the ideal Bianca, Catina’s sister. Throughout the film, she had played the good, devoted female subject. In the end, however, she turns into the bisbetica herself, refusing to listen to her husband. Thus, despite efforts to tame it, the wild feminine spirit proceeds to roam unbridled, continuing to threaten the patriarchal power that depends on female subordination for its own legitimization. This idea of female empowerment on the familial level shows its face in two significant aspects of Sono stato io! First, power is matriarchal rather than patriarchal. The film’s maternal figures, whether in the home (Donna Rosa) or outside (the oppressive and domineering mother of the show girl, one object of Carlo’s lust), possess the real power in the family. Giovannino, the film’s moral super-ego, severely castigates the latter, acidly telling her to take her daughter home and be “una vera madre” [a

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real mother]. Donna Rosa, while already situated in the domestic sphere, does not relinquish her position as “mater familias.” Unlike the despotic mother of Carl Boese’s La famiglia Brambilla va in vacanza [The Brambilla family goes on vacation] (1942) who is silenced by the father as he “puts her in her place” in the film’s conclusion, Donna Rosa remains the locus of economic and political power throughout the film (she makes all financial and personal decisions for the household). Second, there is the narratively marginal but politically important figure of Lauretta, the mischievous daughter, who embodies a dangerous dash of rebellion. A kindred spirit to the protagonists of the Italian schoolgirl comedies (whom Alida Valli herself would go on to portray), Lauretta counters the gender constructions imposed upon her (Reich 1994). She gives some revealing advice to Lisa into the nature of proper feminine conduct in affairs of the heart: Tu sei buona, docile, [gli uomini] ti dicono, “Fai così” e tu fai così. Invece bisogna fare proprio quello che ti si proibisce. Così quelli si mettono paura, e ti stimano. Mi dispiace che per adesso non ti posso dire di più, ma più tardi darò un esempio pratico di quello che ho detto. Si deve rivoltare tutto il paese! Ah, you’re good, docile, men tell you “Do this, and you do it.” Instead, you must do exactly what is forbidden for you to do. Then those guys get afraid, and they admire you. I’m sorry, but for now I can’t tell you any more, but later I’ll give you a practical example of what I said. The whole country must be turned upside-down!

Taken out of context, this passage, which does not appear in the original play, echoes a greater subversive content than it does within the film’s narrative, given the fact that it is uttered by a capricious young girl about to run off with her boyfriend (an attempt which is ultimately thwarted). Nevertheless, it constitutes an example of an oppositional position that manages to squeak through the margins of the cinematic text in the figure of a secondary character. This dialogue not only advocates female subversion (doing what is prohibited), but could go as far as to suggest a national revolt of women, since the play on “paese,” which means both “town” and “country,” is decidedly ambiguous. What do these two mostly forgotten films made at different points during Fascist regime tell us about cinema, theatrical adaptation and political ideology? Studies on fascism and theater have shown very little ideological intervention on the part of the regime (Berezin 1991, Bonsaver 2007, Bragaglia and di Giammatteo, 1992), thus further distancing political propaganda from popular media during the Fascist ventennio.

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With respect to the representation of marriage, there was the additional baggage of national and regional comic traditions that did not die easily. In attempting to politicize the private, Fascism created opportunities for subversion, and films of love and matrimony, based on both new and established theatrical pieces, did not always live happily ever after.

Works Cited Ambrosino, Salvatore. 1991. La commedia d’autore. In Risate di regime. La commedia italiana, 1930-1944, ed. Mino Argentieri, 267—274. Venice: Marsilio. Antonucci, Giovanni. 1980. Eduardo De Filippo. Florence: Le Monnier. Argentieri, Mino. 1998. Il cinema in guerra. Arte, comunicazione e propaganda 1940-1944. Rome: Editori Riuniti. Berezin, Mabel. 1991. The Organization of Political Ideology: Culture, State and Theater in Fascist Italy. American Sociological Review 56, 5: 639—651. Bonsaver, Guido. 2007. Censorship and Literature in Fascist Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bragaglia, Cristina and Fernaldo Di Giammatteo. 1992. Dal teatro al cinema: L’Italia in commedia. Florence: Mediateca Regionale Toscana. Caldwell, Lesley. 1986. Reproducers of the Nation: Women and the Family in Fascist Policy. In Rethinking Italian Fascism: Capitalism, Populism and Culture, ed. David Forgacs, 110—140. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Cavell, Stanley. 1981. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge: Harvard Film Studies. De Grazia, Victoria. 1992. How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Falconi, Dino. 1937. “Sarà stato Giovannino.” Il Popolo d’Italia, December 24. Kahn, Coppélia. 1988. Coming of Age: Marriage and Motherhood in “The Taming of the Shrew.” In William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, ed. Harold Bloom, 41—51. New York: Chelsea. Mafai, Miriam. 1976. Pane nero. Donne e vita quotidiana nella seconda guerra mondiale. Milan: Feltrinelli. Meldini, Piero. 1975. Sposa e madre esemplare. Ideologia e politica della donna e della famiglia durante il fascismo. Florence: Guaraldi. Mosse, George L. 1985. Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe. New York: Howard Fertig.

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Mussolini, Benito. 1958. Matrimoni giovani. In Opera omnia, vol. 26, by Benito Mussolini. Florence: La Fenice. 332. Novy, Marianne L. 1988. Patriarchy and Play in “The Taming of the Shrew.” In William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea. Passerini, Luisa. 1987 Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reich, Jacqueline. 2002. Mussolini at the Movies: Fascism, Film and Culture. In Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922-1943, ed. by Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo, 3—29. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. —. 1995. Reading, Writing, and Rebellion: Sexuality, Collectivity, and Specularity in the Italian Schoolgirl Comedy, 1934-1943. In Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism and Culture, edited by Robin Pickering-Iazzi, 220—251. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Riccora, Paola. 1943. Sarà stato Giovannino. Florence: Libreria del teatro. Simoni, Renato. 1955. Trent’ anni di cronaca drammatica. Vol. 4. Turin: ILTE. Sono stato io! (advertisement). 1937. Lo schermo, October 3. Viviani, Vittorio. 1969. Storia del teatro napoletano. Naples: Guida. Wexman, Virginia Wright. 1993. Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zagarrio, Vito. 1991. La commedia non riconciliata. In Risate di regime: La commedia italiana 1930-1944, ed. Mino Argentieri, 275—87. Venice: Marsilio.

HOW TO DEAL WITH FEMALE PENETRATION AND NOT DIE IN THE ATTEMPT GEORGINA TORELLO, UDELAR (URUGUAY)

The early relationship between cinema and literature was an extremely complex and layered one. Above and beyond the many adaptations of published fiction, the first decades of cinema were subtly and pervasively influenced by literature. Almost every character that appeared in film, even those who made no reference to the literary world, was indebted to some literary antecedent, and often the very structure of the film was bookish in nature. The relationship, of course, was also persistently a utilitarian one: through famous names, film producers promoted the new industry both on a cultural (ideological, pedagogical) and a commercial level (Alovisio 2005, 32). However, by the time Giovanni Pastrone’s Tigre Reale >Royal Tiger@ premiered in Turin on November 9th 1916, the need to legitimize films with prominent literary figures, such as D’Annunzio or Shakespeare, had long since passed.1 In fact, given his notoriety, producer and director Pastrone would have done very well even without the prestigious Giovanni Verga, author of the eponymous novel.2 In the short period between September 1912, the date in which the Itala-Film Company bought the rights to the book from Verga, and the completion of the film in 1916, Pastrone had changed the face of the film company and its relationship to the world market (Cherchi Usai 1985, 81—83; Alovisio 2000, 251). In fact Cabiria, produced a mere three years before, had 1 Alovisio states that by 1913 the relationship between major writers of the time, such as Pirandello, D’Annunzio and Verga, and chief companies such as Ambrosio, Cines and Silentium Film changed. In fact, screenplays by these writers were often refused (Alovisio 2005, 46). 2 As Irene Gambacorti argues, instead of creating the film’s campaign on the writer’s famous name, “la pubblicità insiste piuttosto sul nome dell’attrice, la ‘diva’ Pina Menichelli, e sul regista, il ‘Piero Fosco’ che già ‘vigilò l’esecuzione’ di Cabiria e del Fuoco” >the advertisement insist especially on the name of the ‘diva’ Pina Menichelli, and on the director, the ‘Piero Fosco’ that had already ‘superviced the doing’ of Cabiria and Fire@ (Gambacorti 2003, 89).

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revolutionized, both technically and esthetically, the epic genre in Italy and abroad, giving Pastrone sudden fame3 and the chance to make an analogous progress within the diva-genre when Il Fuoco >Fire@ appeared in 1916, just a few months before Royal Tiger. Needless to say, Pastrone was interested in marketability, but economic reasons were only one side of the coin. A perfect match between Verga’s fin de siècle construction of the femme fatale and the diva-genre’s agenda, based on strong, autonomous and dangerous women, was certainly related to his choice.4 In addition, the casting of Pina Menichelli, who became well-known and the primadonna of the Itala-Film Company after her performance in Fire (Jandelli 2006, 195), also adds a third decisive element to the duo of celebrated writer/newly recognized director: that of the diva. Significantly, the leading Italian actresses of the period—Lyda Borelli, Francesca Bertini and Menichelli—apart from receiving huge salaries and complete freedom in their approach to acting, specialized in the representation of powerful female characters, thus providing an appealing model for the contemporary (female) audience, and radically shifting the gender boundaries of the time—at least in the reduced milieu of the cinematic industry. This perfect match not only involved the plot, but also Pastrone’s awareness and identification of the significant “threads” running through the novel (Miller 1982, 3). It was precisely this intuition which allowed him to successfully trans-codify Verga’s novel from one semiotic system 3

Cherchi Usai states that the first technical revolution of Cabiria is that “la macchina da presa ha cessato di comportarsi da testimone impassibile degli avvenimenti: li crea, li sottolinea, li commenta entrando a far parte dell’azione— come il coro nella tragedia greca—e ridefinendo i confini dell’inquadratura. L’obiettivo, finalmente, esplora lo spazio e spiega, insieme agli interpreti, quanto sta accadendo” [The camera has stopped behaving as an impassible witness of events: it creates them, underlines them, and makes comments about them, taking part of the action—as the choir in the Greek tragedy— and redefining the limits of the shot. The lens, finally, explores the space and explains, together with the actors, what is happening] (Cherchi Usai 1985, 59). 4 The time frame between Verga’s novel and Pastrone’s film is not reflected in the film: no significant changes of cultural and esthetic paradigms seem to modify the plot. As for the political situation in 1916, when Italy was already participating in World War I, the ‘out of time atmosphere’ that characterizes Royal Tiger appears as a common feature of most of the diva-films of the time. Regarding female construction, between 1873 and 1916, the iconography remains practically identical. What silent cinema changed (more or less unwittingly), through its female star system, was the possibility for women to appropriate the femme fatale role, creating a new performative style. See note 5.

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into another. Some of Pastrone’s adaptation strategies, the most important being abreviatio (the “extreme” abridging of the plots), can be traced back to the first techniques developed in 1907 when was converted into celluloid “tutta la biblioteca dell’italiano medio, fatta di classici illustrati a dispense, romanzi d’appendice, opere liriche, drammi del teatro popolare e libri edificanti” >the entire library of a middle class Italian was made up of the illustrated classics, serial novels, plays from the popular theater as well as more edifying books@ (Gambacorti 2003, 23—24). Further adaptation practices used in Pastrone’s version are perfectly in tune with other contemporary Italian films premiered at the time: the removal of marginal characters,5 the exposure given to nature, the use of literal text quotations, and more importantly, the preeminence given to the female protagonist 5

Pastrone eliminates the male protagonist’s family (wife, son, mother, cousin) in a move that was quite common in Italian productions. The dichotomy good wife/dangerous vampire, mandatory in other national films, is not always maintained by Italian directors. This choice allows the focus to be on the female protagonist, implying the good girl in absentia. It also permits Pastrone to relocate characteristics of the eliminated characters into those who remained. For example, Verga’s playing on the fin de siècle proto-scientific discourses, extended throughout the text to other characters are concentrated in Pastrone’s film in Natka’s body: she not only suffers from tuberculosis symptoms, but also reproduces the gestures of hysteria of her lover’s (eliminated) wife. The diva-film genre, in fact, defined itself through the creation of a new acting style. It was introduced by Lyda Borelli in Ma l’amor mio non muore (1913) and became the trademark for many of the subsequent films with tumultuous plots. Elsa Holbein, the heroine of Ma l’amor mio non muore, a nervous and agitated, yet innocent woman has its most popular epigones, in the following years, with the diabolic Alba d’Oltrevita, protagonist of Rapsodia satanica or the murderess Marina di Malombra, from the homonymous novel by Fogazzaro, to mention only two of the most significant examples interpreted by Borelli. Shortly after the premiere of Ma l’amor mio non muore other actresses follow her acting style. The new cinematic woman, the type of woman created by Lyda Borelli, performs, as Bernhardt did in theatres several years before, the gestures and movements of Charcot’s hysteric patients, postures largely popularized by the graphic schemes and photos that circulated in Europe. Regarding Charcot’s popularity among artists and intellectuals of the time Micale points out that “When in 1884 Sarah Bernhardt, the most celebrated stage actress of her age, whish to perfect a performance of an attack of hysterical insanity in the play Adrienne Lecouvreur, she repaired for practice to a cell in the quartiers des aliénées at the Salpetrière” (Micale 1995,198). Menichelli’s performance includes, towards the end, a representation of the hysteric curve, synthesizing the whole hysteric style, which for Italian audiences (especially female), spanned to the whole production of silent-divas and therefore symbolically to the mighty Natka (Torello 2006).

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(Gambacorti 2003, 103). Pastrone’s project, however, seems to have taken adaptation a step further than just a well-executed version: the main structure of the film depends on the director’s visual multiplication and reworking of key recurrences in the novel, consistently combined with metacinematic references. It is precisely this balance between literary and cinematic forms that makes Royal Tiger (from now on the film will be addressed as RT) a successful adaptation. Before the issue of fidelity became part of adaptation theories (giving rise to endless academic discussions), Pastrone developed his own method of adaptation, bearing in mind the cinema’s potential as a “popular medium with the texts and symbols of highbrow culture” (Alovisio 2000, 257). The novel Royal Tiger, published in 1873, is not Verga’s only portrayal of the femme fatale figure. Before becoming the father of Italian verismo, he more or less successfully created an ample gallery of dangerous women and fearful men, reworking the esthetics and topics of his time (Biasin 1970, 24—41). Indeed, the literary strategies of Royal Tiger, in contrast with Verga’s later innovative naturalistic works, may appear rather clichéd. However, upon closer scrutiny, the construction of the characters and the power relationship between them are rather unusual. It was possibly the male-female liaison what really intrigued Pastrone in the first place. The story begins when the protagonist Giorgio La Ferlita, a young diplomat, is about to marry Erminia Ruscaglia, a lady with a tempting dowry. The intradiegetic narrator, an old friend of the protagonist, upon receiving the wedding invitation, recalls the last meeting with Giorgio, and his tragically altered state of mind. In an incipit that combines two divergent atmospheres—the security of the marriage with Erminia and a dangerous past with another woman—the narrator provides all the details concerning Giorgio’s loss of reason: obviously, a love story turned sour. Years before, at an upper-class Florentine party, Giorgio and the Russian countess, Nata, were introduced to each other and shortly afterwards they indulged in a brief affair, whose “colors” were all one can discern in the femme fatale genre’s palette. Nata was married to a man she did not love, was a foreigner (the dangerous charge of aliens would become a key element of the rhetoric of WWI, and thus by the time the film was released), a predator of men, and finally, as the common femme fatale, she was terminally ill (with tuberculosis). In contrast, Giorgio was Italian, rather innocent, weak-minded and a single man: thus he represented the perfect victim of the vamp. However, Nata suddenly changed her mind and left him. After his marriage, followed by a brief period of peaceful family life, Nata and Giorgio’s love affair flourishes once again, when she returns to die near to him, something she had

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promised before their separation. From this moment on, Giorgio’s domestic milieu is viciously threatened by Nata. The novel ends with the female protagonist’s death (her final and “fair” punishment) and Giorgio’s reentering into the expected social order (a flawless reassuring patriarchal ending). As I said earlier, it is not the rarity of the plot of Royal Tiger that captures Pastrone’s attention. What makes the novel significantly appealing, is the visual possibilities of Verga’s narrative construction, primarily through its strong web of repetitions.6 One of the most consistent (and noteworthy) recurrences in the book is build around the term “penetration” and the metaphors and actions related to it. As J. Hillis Miller has stated in his book concerning 19th century English novels, Fiction and Repetition, “a long work like a novel is interpreted, by whatever sort of reader, in part through the identification of recurrences and of meanings generated through recurrences” because “in a novel, what is said two or more times may not be true, but the reader is fairly safe in assuming that it is significant” (Miller 1982, 1—2).7 The microcosm of Royal Tiger is, in fact, populated by characters whose interactions are defined through their possibility or impossibility to penetrating (associated with entering, trespassing, but also with understanding, knowing and, of course, tinted with sexual innuendo). To a certain extent, the whole narrative could be read and understood solely through these recurrences: they draw a careful map of the struggle in gender relationships, and stress what eventually constitutes the main concern of the book: the dangerousness and allure of women and their effect on weak men. The solid network of “penetrations” throughout Royal Tiger concern mostly Nata, who is defined metonymically as penetrating and impenetrable in relation to Giorgio: while her eyes are labeled as penetranti and impenetrabili (297), her visage is defined consistently as impenetrabile (303, 308, 316) and her tenacity (so strong Giorgio cannot sustain it) as penetrante (302). Verga’s manifest play on the sexual connotations of the term, condense men’s fear for the femme fatale, at the same time giving a rather pessimistic view on men’s capacity of action. Needless to say, the visual possibilities of such a recurrence are multiple, and Pastrone adds many more.

6

All the quotes are from Verga 1952. In this text I will refer to Miller’s “small scale” repetitions as the “repetition[s] of verbal elements: words, figures of speech, shapes or gestures, or, more subtly, covert repetitions that act like metaphors” and “large scale” repetitions that consist on “events or scenes [that] may be duplicated within the text” (Miller 1982, 1—2).

7

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In the first scene of the film, the penetrating power of Natka8 is achieved through her control of the gaze in a sequence entirely created by Pastrone. After an intertitle that announces “Una serata al Palazzo di Rancy,” >A gathering at the Rancy Palace@ Giorgio enters a room full of men playing cards. This opening scene, although largely employed in the diva-genre, in RT plays a particular function. Given that gambling is connected with luck and risk, Giorgio’s refusal to participate in the game functions to delay the onset of his perils: he is doomed to endure a more dangerous threat, introduced by the following intertitle, “Ecco la contessa russa! quella che spinse alla morte l’ultimo suo amante…” >There she is, the Russian Countess! The one who pushed her last lover to his death …@. Through the addition of this scene, Pastrone efficiently uses the connection gambling/dangerous woman, not only to add other layers to Verga’s narrative, but also to link it (and appropriate it) to the cinematic tradition. Abruptly, the gamblers interrupt their game to observe Natka, (who is outside the camera’s field of vision): what the spectators see is the men staring at the Russian countess. The structure of the scene relies on the logics of the shot-reverse shot to play on the spectators’ expectations: the “men staring” prepares the audience for a scene in which the countess would, presumably, be set as the object of the gaze. The scene that follows, though, refuses to fulfill the public’s expectations. At first her back is facing the camera, but almost immediately, she turns to face it (in a medium-long shot), and then she actively advances towards it (in a medium shot), beginning to deconstruct her to-be-looked-at-ness as Laura Mulvey put it. The next shot (close up) shows Natka’s looking at the party, from left to right, covering the whole spectrum, and by doing so assuming the role of the looking agent, or even the voyeur, transforming the party into the spectacle, and thus rejecting the topical condition as the object of desire. The close up shows her sorrowful expression, that is, her losing control for a second in front of the people—and the camera—but on finishing her stare, she adjusts her appearance, smiling again to join in the party (conveying the other side of the coin, her impenetrability, through masquerade). In cinematic terms, Natka’s looking from left to right reproduces the panoramic shot used in Italian cinema at least since 1909 (Brunetta 1993, 157) and easily recognized by the audience as such. 9 8

Pastrone’s version adds a “k” to the countess name, Nata, maybe to make it even more Russian. 9 For this scene, it is interesting to note Pastrone’s adaptation of a passage in the novel: “passò in rivista col cannocchiale le acconciature eleganti” >she glimpsed

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Her active gaze is evident in TR from this moment on, as is the case in the novel as well, through her “occhi penetranti” >penetrating eyes@. In addition, what Pastrone introduces, in cinematic terms, is a clear link between Natka’s power and the power of the camera. In fact, the scene has a dual value: intradiegetically, it refers to the power of the protagonist upon men; extradiegetically, it enacts the power of the diva, in this case Menichelli, over her public, a topic that was discussed particularly in film magazines of the time (Ferrucio 1914, 1). As Francesca Bertini will do in Mariute (1918), representing herself and her character, here Menichelli deconstructs the character’s image, thus referring to her condition of object of desire and rejecting it, if only for a moment. Furthermore, Pastrone empathizes Natka’s connection with the power of the camera in the flash-back scene (present in the book), in which she tells Giorgio her tragic love story, mentioned at the beginning of the film. By means of a long flash-back that lasts more than 7 minutes, the character narrates her story, controlling the discourse, elaborating it, and modifying it with respect to the version given to Giorgio (and to the public) at the beginning of the film by the men gambling.10 In the novel the meaning of the recurrence is expanded, but not sealed, by two key passages: Nata’s mediated penetration through the sword in Giorgio’s duel, and her literal penetration through a kiss. Her dangerousness, mentioned in the opening titles “spinse alla morte…” >pushed towards death@, is visualized in the duel sequence (another key ritual in diva-films) which Pastrone chooses to maintain and masterfully edit. To explain it briefly: during the party Giorgio asks Nata for a dance and, as customary, she gives him her little notebook, which is already completely booked. Instead of returning it to her (and wait for the next party), Giorgio crosses out the name of a famous swordsman thus forcing him to engage in a duel. Nata’s indirect look in the opening scene and her capacity to penetrate visually, is reformulated here, in this indirect way of menacing his life. As the duelist’s sword enters Giorgio’s flesh the following morning, her metaphoric ability of penetrate becomes literal. The setting of the duel scene consists of a very long shot of a bush and the duelists. When the shot changes (to a medium shot) the camera shows with her opera glasses the elegant headdresses@ (315). In addition, when this scene later on in the film is presented, it will reinforce Natka’s visual command over situations, as well as the internal coherence of the film, linking the scene directly with the beginning of the film. 10 This “film in the film” is used as a vehicle to stage not only the female protagonist’s power over her former lover, but also the technical possibilities of the Itala-Film Company to change sceneries (the Russian winter, the snow, etc.).

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only the image of a very active Giorgio cutting completely from the shot to the other man (only his sword is visible). Yet, the following shot (medium shot), once again, breaks the public’s expectations: hurt, and with his shirt ripped, Giorgio is resting on the ground, while the other contender, in perfect health, salutes him and goes away. While following the plot closely, the visual organization of the scene (one man standing and the other lying on the ground) visually establishes Giorgio’s weak status within the narrative. The scene effectively synthesizes the relationship between the Nata and Giorgio as described in the novel: Dall’incontro di questi due prodotti malsani di una delle esuberanze patologiche della civiltà, il dramma doveva scaturire naturalmente, dramma o farsa, come dall’urto di due correnti elettriche. Giorgio effeminato, effeminato nel senso moderno ed elegante, buon spadaccino all’occorrenza, […] fiacco per non aver mai combattuto sé stesso. Quell’altra con tutti gli impeti bruschi e violenti della passione inferma, vagabonda ed astratta, però forte e risoluta, col cuore di ghiaccio e l’immaginazione ardente. Egli con tutte le suscettibilità, con tutte le delicatezze, con tutte le debolezze muliebri; ella con tutte le veemenze, tutte le energie, tutti i dispotismi virili (292). From the encounter of these two unhealthy products, from one of the pathological exuberances of this society, drama had to happen naturally, drama or farce, as from the clash of two electric currents. Giorgio effeminate, effeminate in the modern and elegant sense of the word, a good swordsman when necessary, >…@ weak because he himself has never had to fight himself. And her, with all the brusque and violent furiousness of a sick passion, tramp and abstract, but strong and resolute, with an icy heart and an ardent imagination. He with all the susceptibilities, embodying all the flimsiness, with all the female weaknesses; she with all her intensity and energies, embodying the virile despotisms.

This description (a dangerous chiasm: a manly woman and a feminine man) applies to the whole of society and can be read as a warning to readers. In addition, in Verga’s narrative, it will be further reproduced through further recurrences of the term penetration and its derivatives, strategically used in the other four key characters. The eyes of Nata’s husband’s are cold and penetrating (320), making him one of the two “virile” men of the diegesis, the other one being Nata’s former lover (both Russian), but while the husband is almost absent from the action in the novel, the lover is deceased, leaving the reader without a masculine, strong male figure. In addition, Erminia’s accent is penetrating in relation to her cousin (346), with whom she is in love. Her potential of penetrating her cousin makes her stronger and aggressive, but only, as Verga indirectly

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suggests, in relation to love “out of marriage”: for her husband she is innocuous and harmless. The two characters actually penetrated in the novel are, curiously enough, Giorgio and the narrator, concluding Royal Tiger’s structure of gender interaction. Giorgio, besides being penetrated by Nata’s eyes—eyes that cannot be sustained—and by her tongue, is penetrated also by peace at home (a natural feminine domain): “sembravagli sentirsi penetrare da una pace solenne” >it seemed to him as if he were penetrated by a solemn peace@ (327). But this rhetoric of peace is destined to crumble just a few lines later. Finally, the narrator’s soul is penetrated by Giorgio’s incisive accent, which instead of being violent or destructive is painful: “un accento che mi penetrava l’anima” >an accent that penetrated my soul@ (340): “Quell’uomo che si accasciava sotto il dolore faceva pietà; Giorgio, di solito così fatuo, così spensierato, si contorceva per nascondermi le sue lagrime e la sua debolezza. Tentai prendergli una mano; egli mi respinse dolcemente e continuò a piangere” >That man losing heart to his pain made me sad; Giorgio, always superficial and lighthearted, writhed to hide his tears and his weakness. I tried to take his hand; he refused gently and continued to cry@ (340). Similar to what Freud would define as the fear of castration some years later, Verga orchestrates an environment in which social relations are marked by the possibility or impossibility of female penetration, which Pastrone staged through the very active use of the camera (Cherchi Usai 1985, 59). It is not strange that RT includes the passage in the novel of Nata’s kiss in the theatre, during the infamous Ruy-Blas duetto. After ignoring Giorgio the whole night long, she starts crying (as she identifies with the couple on stage) “le stesse lagrime dell’altra volta, le quali sgorgavano dal più profondo, ribelli, schive, amarissime su quel viso impenetrabile, sul quale s’indovinava solo la lotta interna e la collera” >the same tears as the last time, the tears that pour forth from the depths, rebel, bitter on that impenetrable face, upon which the inner struggle and fury is clear@ At this point Nata decides to leave the theater: Giorgio l’aiutava a mettere il cappuccio nel fondo del palchetto; ella lasciava fare, e lì, nella semi oscurità, ritta e palpitante, gli afferrò all’improvviso le tempie, e pallida, seria, risoluta, coll’occhio luccicante, senza dire una parola, gli appoggiò lungamente sulle labbra le labbra umide e calde (316). Giorgio was helping her to put on her hood in the depths of the theatre box; she let him do it, and there, in the semi-darkness, upright and trembling, she suddenly seized his temples; and pale, serious, stubborn, her eyes

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glittering, without saying a word, for a long time she laid her moist and warm lips on his.

If the description of a woman kissing a man could be called scandalous for the readers of the time, the visual rendering of it—amplified by the large scale images—in a film theatre (a public space considered by some as promiscuous) would have certainly added an extra shocking effect. Bram Dijkstra studied the appalling value of the kiss depicted in A Fool There Was (1915) on audiences: film kisses, if there were any, tended to be restricted to pecks on the cheek or a very fleeting touch of lips. Theda Bara’s brazen and prolonged depredation of this civilized man’s mouth, therefore, was a violation of more than a dramatic taboo. In depicting a woman’s absolute erotic power over a man, this kiss also became a violation of the principles of manhood itself: here was a woman who was, in essence, raping a man (Dijkstra 1996, 11).11

The kissing scene in RT quite faithfully follows Verga’s description, effectively rewriting and shortening the previous passage into an intertitle that creates an extra dose of suspense (concerning the kiss itself): “E così, nell’ombra, improvvisamente, senza profferire sillaba…” >in the semidarkness, suddenly, without saying a word…@. Natka’s predatory behavior is embodied through her hands—almost hooks—that grab Giorgio’s head violently. To increase the ferocity of the scene Pastrone adds another predatory gesture to her repertoire: when alone in the car, after leaving Giorgio at the theater, Natka clutches some flowers and bites them. The similar staging of the kiss in A Fool There Was and RT allows us to quote once again from Dijkstra’s analysis: for him the value of the kiss was “not merely the bite of a fantasy vampire. Instead, it was an evocation of sexual intercourse as the deadly attack of a cannibalistic usurper. It showed vividly that to get involved with a sexual woman was equivalent to death itself” (Dijkstra 1996, 11). However, if the symbolic implications of the kiss in A Fool There Was and RT are similar, in Powell’s film the kiss is “the equivalent of death,” thus simply a metaphor, for the protagonist of RT could become literal: in fact Natka’s disease, tuberculosis, is extremely contagious. 11

As late as November 1927, the American magazine, Motion Picture, publishes an article called “Kissing According to Custom” that represents visually (through film stills) the appropriate ways of kissing (Motion Picture 1927, 70). The article shows rather conventional poses.

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The potential death threat of Natka, connoted by the kiss scene, is further underlined at their last meeting. Through a symbolic outfit (a common use in the diva-film genre) Pastrone conveys Natka’s dangerous nature: waiting for Giorgio she wears a robe that clearly resembles a pair of bat’s wings, and when he opens the door she aggressively embraces him, thus making explicit through costume, the metaphor of a sexual woman as a vampire. It is worth quoting, at this point, the novel’s description of Giorgio and Nata’s first meeting: “vedendoli [Giorgio and his friend] venire, [Nata] aggrottò le sopracciglia con un rapido movimento, e fissò su di Giorgio, attraverso lo specchio, uno sguardo limpido e ghiacciato come il cristallo che lo rifletteva; poi si voltò intieramente, e gli piantò gli occhi in viso per due o tre secondi…” >watching them coming [Nata] quickly frowned and, through the looking glass, stared at Giorgio with a look as limpid and icy as the crystal that reflected it; then she turned around entirely, and rested her eyes on his face for two or three seconds…@ (290—91). The text underlines Nata’s active and incisive look (through the verbs fissare >to fix@ and piantare >to stick@) also introducing her indirect gaze into the mirror. This passage, reproduced faithfully in the film, intertwines with the motive of mirrors (Tsivian 1992; Brewster and Jacobs 1997) ubiquitous in the diva-genre as devices for the multiplication of the diva figure within the scene: open invitations to voyeurism, to stage the hedonism of the female characters, and finally, as tools to see others, something that could be read as a metaphor of cinema itself.12 In RT mirrors proliferate (one in the book, ten in the film) thus conforming a web of quotations of the first scene and so throughout the story. One paradigmatic example of this use is the scene of the encounter of Natka and Giorgio after a brief separation. He has taken up with a former lover, as the titles announce, and they take a ride in a horse-drawn carriage. Giorgio is shown seated in the carriage which is perpendicularly distanced from the camera (long shot), while a modern car advances towards it. A medium shot reveals that Natka is in the car visibly shocked by the vision of the couple. As in the book, Giorgio stops the carriage and runs towards Natka, but his pursuit is unsuccessful, as shown through a shot-reverse shot (a technique more characteristic of American than Italian films at the time). At this point Natka’s indirect gaze of the first scene is 12 The meta-cinematic reference implicit in mirrors is analyzed by Blom for the symbol of the owl works in Pastrone’s film Fire (1915): “like the owl, the cinema needs the night to operate, like the owl, the actress stares at the spectators with her big, heavily- made-up eyes, not only hypnotizing the actor on the screen, but also the public watching the film” (Blom 1992, 63).

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reenacted (in an added scene by Pastrone consistent with the poetics of repetition). A dynamic editing (that matches the speed of the Natka’s modern car rather than Giorgio’s traditional carriage) shows: 1) Natka with a mirror in her hand (a medium shot); 2) Natka staring at the mirror (an over-the-shoulder frame); 3) a detail of the mirror with a reflection of a small-scale Giorgio chasing Natka’s car; 4) Natka ordering the driver to continue and putting away the mirror (a medium shot); 5) Giorgio, in the middle of the street, alone and visibly upset (a long shot). The addition of the mirror in this scene emphasizes Natka’s power over the narrative: the the mirror (as well as the camera) not only contains but also circumscribes Giorgio, by choosing a specific angle and capturing his image on a small scale (notice that the diva always appears large on the screen, while Giorgio is reduced in size by her point of view). The direct connection between Natka’s active gaze and her power represented by mirrors varies throughout the film according to the protagonist’s health condition.13 This leads to different interpretations; Natka might only be a metaphor of the film that is, in fact, approaching its end, or instead, she might be showing the fugacity of her power, something that relates to the (proper) destiny of the femme fatale. That the film explicitly links the mirrors’ reflection with disease, suggested briefly at the beginning,14 is underlined towards the end: after taking a potion that, according to the intertitle, “non allunga la vita bensì l’accorcia,” >it does not prolong life, it shortens it@ she runs to the mirror to check whether she can hide, once again, the signs of her physical decadence if only for her last meeting with Giorgio. Gradually, as her condition gets worse, she loses connection with mirrors and, by the end, she is passively reflected by it. Interestingly, the shot capturing Natka’s final attack reproduces, although marginally, the undersized image of the lovers: the mirror’s 13

Mantegazza talks about the literature of his time, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Goncourt, and their imitators, as being a decadent literature that portrays just the nervous or hypochondriacs: “L’ingegno umano, quale ci si mostra in loro e in tutti gli altri scrittori di decadenza contemporanei, è un malato che sta davanti ad uno specchio a guardarsi la lingua, a tastarsi il polso e si fa auscultare e racconta e descrive agli altri, con minuziosità morbosa, il suo male” [the human intellect, as it is shown in them and in all the other contemporary writers of the decadence, is a sick person that goes to the mirror to look at his tongue, controls his pulse and asks to be auscultated and describes to the others, with a morbid meticulousness, the intricacies of his disease] (Mantegazza 1887, 30). 14 Nata was portrayed sitting in front of the mirror putting on makeup, a clear reference to her egocentrism, but also as her interest in covering up the signs of her illness.

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function is now confined to reproducing and multiplying the spectacle of her dying body.

The End(ings) In their dual nature of artistic and industrial products, films are conditioned by their real presence on the market. At a synchronic level, they depend on their distribution being both within and outside the country; at a diachronic level, their fate is determined by the conservation or disappearance of the reels, and of course, by subsequent restorations. As it is well known, much of silent cinema corpus has been lost: historians and critics are left with a ruined map, and a long street to walk.15 The actual fate of RT, after its production, luckily not as tragic as that of many other films, is worth mentioning. The only copy available and restored, donated by Giovanni Pastrone to the Museo del Cinema (of Turin) in 1959, does not appear to be the version that was originally distributed in Italy, but rather the version produced for foreign markets, possibly destined for Anglo-Saxon audiences (Gambacorti 2003, 88—89). In fact, during this period, it was common practice to tailor a film depending on its “final destination,” i.e. to adjust to suit the interests and idiosyncrasies of foreign audiences. This was, of course, a very controversial topic among writers, directors, and producers alike, but the market dictated the rules, as it still does today. According to a prestigious actor of the time, Mario Bonnard: Il soggetto si faceva su misura e con finale variabile. Per l’Italia bastava un normale finale drammatico; per l’Inghilterra, puritana, ci volevano il bacio e il matrimonio, in Russia non andava. Il morto ci voleva ad ogni costo. E se uno era già previsto, bisognava aggiungerne un secondo (Rondolino 1987, 425).16 The screenplay was made to measure with adjustable endings. For Italy a normal dramatic ending was enough; for puritan England, it was necessary to include a kiss and a wedding; for Russia this was not sufficient—a casualty was needed at any rate, and if one was already projected, an additional one it was required.

In the available version, Verga’s ending (Nata’s lonely death in a quiet hotel) is substituted by the happy ending at the splendid Gran Hotel 15

The image is from the notorious book by Giuliana Bruno on Elvira Notari (Bruno 1993). 16 See also Zappulla Muscarà 1982, 512; Robinson 1998, 83—88.

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Theatre dell’Odeon. 17 Bonnard’s colorful quote seems to be in line with the surviving copy of RT:18 for the Italian audience who surely knew Verga’s story, such an ending would have been unacceptable, but could work very well for international viewers to which the literary source played a secondary role. It is important to note that, if the ending of RT follows the needs of other markets unconcerned with issues of fidelity, it maintains, at a stylistic level, a very Pastronian flavor. Not able (nor completely willing) to keep Verga’s ending, the director made great use of his cinematic techniques primarily used in his other productions like Cabiria and Il fuoco. Created ex-novo, the final part of the film is characterized by a parallel montage of very long shots of the Hotel (the neon lights, the crowd, dancers performing) and medium and close-up shots of Natka inside her room. The intertitle effectively explains the meaning of these contrasting scenes to the audience, i.e. how to read or interpret the cinematic language (Gambacorti 2003, 180—187). “Nell'ala dell'Hotel dove Natka si prepara a morire ferve la vita cosmopolita” >In the wing of the hotel where Natka prepares for her death, cosmopolitan life is in full swing@. The parallelism continues when fire breaks out at the Odeon, and another intertitle explains: “e mentre sta ardendo il dramma della passione nel teatro vicino la folla applaude la danza del fuoco” >and while the excitement of the passion is burning, in the nearby theater the public admire the dance of fire@ (my emphasis). Scenes of fire were a landmark of Itala-Film 17

At the end, even if Natka’s husband closes the room’s door from the outside, trapping the couple, Giorgio manages to save Natka. The final sequence shows the lovers in a small boat in the middle of the sea, and the intertitle renders explicit the happy ending: “Natka fervente d'amore per Giorgio adorato si sente miracolosamente tornare alla gioventù e alla vita” >Natka, deliriously in love, comes miraculously back to life, and even feels younger thanks to her beloved Giorgio@. 18 In a letter from Giovanni Verga to a friend, the writer says: “L’Itala-Film Company, poiché la censura di certi paesi esteri, come dite, non tollererebbe forse la morte della protagonista di Tigre reale per etisia sullo schermo cinematografico, potrebbe sopprimere quest’ultima scena o adattarvi quella variante che crederete meglio. Io non mi oppongo e potete darne l’assicurazione in nome mio. Tanto nel cinematografo se ne vedono tante, e tante me ne han fatto vedere e ne vedo” [The Itala-Film Company, because of the censorship in certain foreign countries, as you say, maybe would not tolerate the death of the protagonist of Royal Tiger from tuberculosis on the screen, the last scene could be suppressed or adapted to the alternative you think is better. I do not oppose it and you can guarantee this in my name. Anyhow, in Cinema one could see everything, and I had seen everything, and everything I still see] (Gambacorti 2003, 88—89).

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Company’s production (the best known being Cabiria) especially since the filmmaker and special-effects master Segundo de Chomón, (who performs the pyrotechnical effects in RT) joined the company: la “meraviglia” visiva sarà un ingrediente fondamentale della sua formula accanto alla sovrabbondanza di fuochi e fiamme nelle scene culminanti. Un grande incendio, l’incubo di un protagonista. Il catalogo Itala ne presenta a decine, tutti realizzati con grande cura (Cherchi Usai 1986, 14). visual “bewilderment” is an essential ingredient of his formula together with the over-abundance of fire and flames in key scenes. A big fire, the nightmare of a protagonist. The Itala’s catalogue has dozens of them, all done with extreme care.

Through the spectacular scene of fire, the ending of RT juxtaposes the small scale space of the diva-film genre (interiors, elegant gardens always focused on or circumscribing the protagonists) with the large-scale space characteristic of the epic genre. Since Pastrone was quite aware of genre boundaries, such trespassing can be regarded as an egocentric quote of his oeuvre, (the similarities between the disaster and fire scenes from La caduta di Troia and Cabiria are remarkable), or more tempting, as the conclusive adjustment of the novel to a more visual, cinematic style. After redefining the thriller as a genre in Tigris (1912), changing forever the epic genre through Cabiria, and adding to the diva-genre a personal film d’art style with Fire, Pastrone carefully elaborates the strategies for a flawless adaptation of Royal Tiger. Faithful to Verga’s narrative only when feasible, or convenient, to his stylistic, technical or thematic agenda, the director has given to his contemporaries (and us) a noteworthy version of the text, and a lesson on how to deal, successfully, with different levels of female (growing) power.

Works Cited Alovisio, Silvio. 2005. Voci del silenzio. La sceneggiatura nel cinema muto italiano. Milan: Il Castoro. —. 2000. The “Pastrone System:” Itala Film from the origins to World War I. Film History 12: 250—261. Biasin, Gian-Paolo. 1970. Il veleno di Narcisa. MLN 85, 1: 24—41. Blom, Ivo L. 1992. “Il Fuoco” or the Fatal Portrait. The XIXth Century in the Italian Silent Cinema. Iris 14, 15: 55—66. Brewster, Ben, and Lea Jacobs. 1997. Theatre to Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Brunetta, Gian Piero. 1993. Storia del cinema italiano. Il cinema muto 1895-1929. Vol. 1. Rome: Editori riuniti. Bruno, Giuliana. 1993. Streetwalking on a Ruined Map. Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cherchi Usai, Paolo. 1985. Giovanni Pastrone. Firenze: La Nuova Italia. —. 1986. Giovanni Pastrone. Gli anni d’oro del cinema a Torino. Turin: UTET. Dijkstra, Bram. 1996. Evil Sisters. The Threat of Female Sexualiy and the Cult of Manhood. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Ferrucio, Valerio. 1914. Il cinematografo e il suo pubblico. Psicologia a corto metraggio II. Film corriere settimanale 1, 6: 1. Gambacorti, Irene. 2003. Storie de cinema e letteratura. Verga, Gozzano, D’Annunzio. Florence: Società Editrice Fiorentina. Jandelli, Cristina. 2006. Le dive italiane del cinema muto. Palermo: L’epos. Kissing According to Custom. 1927. Motion Picture 34, 4: 70. Mantegazza, Paolo. 1925. Fisiologia dell’Amore. Milan: Barion Editore. —. 1887. Il secolo nevrosico. Florence: Barbera. Micale, Mark. 1995. Approaching Hysteria. Disease and Its Interpretations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Miller, J. Hillis. 1982. Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Robinson, David. 1998. I film italiani in Gran Bretagna, 1909-1914. In Cabiria e il suo tempo, ed. Paolo Bertetto and Gianni Rondolino, 83— 92. Milan-Turin: Il Castoro-Museo Nazionale del Cinema. Rondolino. Gianni. 1987. Il cinema. In Storia sociale e culturale d’Italia. Vol. 3. Busto Arsizio: Bramante. Torello, Georgina. 2006. Con el demonio en el cuerpo: la mujer en el cine mudo italiano (1913-1920). Secuencias 23: 6—19. Tsivian, Yuri. 1992. Portraits, Mirrors, Death: On Some Decadent Clichés in Early Russian Films. Iris 14 15: 67—83. Verga, Giovanni. 1952. Una peccatrice e altri racconti. Milan: Mondadori. Zappulla Muscarà, Sarah. 1982. Contributi per una storia dei rapporti tra letteratura e cinema muto (Verga, De Roberto, Capuana, Martoglio e la settima arte). La rassegna della letteratura italiana 86: 501—560.

WITH EYES WIDE SHUT: FROM PRICÒ TO I BAMBINI CI GUARDANO PIERO GAROFALO, UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE

In the latter half of the ventennio, Italy’s film industry drew on literary sources rather than original materials for its cinematic narratives to an extent unparalleled before or since in the history of Italian cinema. Of the 587 films released between 1934 and 1943, the majority were adaptations of literary texts.1 Eschewing the classics, producers and directors found their inspiration in “lower-case” literature (i.e., lesser known works, feuilletons, serialized novels, theatrical comedies) that would appeal to the petit-bourgeoisie—a public of film-goers that had come to accept, as well as to expect, that cinema as a cultural product, would not stray far from either the social mores or the conventions of narrative.2 Within this cultural milieu, the film I bambini ci guardano occupies an ambivalent position. On the one hand, Vittorio De Sica’s projection of the novel Pricò by Cesare Giulio Viola, onto the silver screen is symptomatic of the symbiotic rapport between literary and cinematic establishments; on the other hand, the film ventures, tentatively to be sure, into uncharted cinematic territory. Frequently cited as a harbinger of neo-realism, the film elicits a sense of novelty that draws its inspiration from both Viola’s singular text and the De Sica/Cesare Zavattini nascent “cappuccino” collaboration.3 1

For example, in 1937, of the 31 feature-length films released by Italian production companies, 4 were drawn from novels and 16 found their source in theatre; in 1938, of the 40 films released, 4 were based on novels and 19 on theatrical pieces; in 1939, of the 74 films released, 16 had their origins in novels/short stories and 25 came from the theatre. These film statistics are derived from Aldo Bernardini, ed., Il cinema sonoro 1930-1969 (Roma: ANICA, 1992). 2 On the role of screenwriters and screenplays in the 1930s, see Bruni 2006, 413— 29. 3 Zavattini described his rapport with De Sica as comparable to that of coffee and milk, which, when mixed together, form a cappuccino—something completely

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Cesare Giulio Viola While De Sica and Zavattini continue to enjoy sterling artistic reputations, that of Viola’s has faded into blackness. Nevertheless, if Viola’s textual production has perhaps not bequeathed what it had once promised, his was a name much bandied about in literary circles in the 1930s.4 One of the decade’s most popular dramatists, between the years 1934 and 1940, Viola ranked eleventh among the 168 active playwrights for the number of different works staged.5 The critic, Arnaldo Frateili, describes Viola as one of the most productive and celebrated authors of the period (Frateili 1966), whose theatre did not adhere to the tenets of any of the inter-war artistic movements, but instead, subsumed their influences while remaining rooted in the schemas of the 19th century bourgeois stage. Critical praise of Viola, as a novelist, is not lacking either: Vito Pandolfi cites Pricò as the sole Italian novel capable of sharing the stage with the world’s masterpieces of children’s literature (Pandolfi 1956). Similarly, the critic Tullio Kezich recalls an anecdote from childhood of the actor and future producer, Nino Crisman, declaring that Pricò would be enough to earn Viola the literary honor of Accademico d’Italia (Kezich 1999, 19). As a law student in Rome, to the camaraderie of aspiring jurisprudents he preferred the denizens of the Caffè Aragno’s (in)famous terza saletta where, for the first third of the century, Rome’s cultural élite fraternized with the requisite poseurs, acolytes, and sycophants. Here, within its hallowed halls, Viola befriended Sergio Corazzini, Fausto Maria Martini and the entire Roman crepuscular poetic clique.6 Their influence is new and different from which it is impossible to discern or to separate the original components. For a discussion of their “caffé and latte” relationship, see Gandin 1956, and Cosulich 1961. All three artists brought a wealth of experience to the production. A veteran performer with over forty films to his credit, De Sica had already placed himself behind the camera four times in the last three years. With his signature on nineteen screenplays, neither could Zavattini be considered a filmic neophyte. Having collaborated on six scripts to date, Viola as well brought a seasoned cinematic hand to the project. In De Sica’s previous directorial efforts he had employed multiple screenwriters (e.g., five for Teresa Venerdì and six for Un garibaldino al convento), and for this new project he again turned to an équipe calling on no less than seven hands to mold the literary material. 4 For a comprehensive critical evaluation of Viola’s œuvre see Scorrano1996. 5 The Annuario del teatro italiano records 354 new plays for the period 1934-1940. Gherardo Gherardi, who collaborated with Viola on the screenplay for I bambini ci guardano, ranked fifth. For a discussion of Italian theatre during the Fascist ventennio, see Berezin 1994, 1237—1286. 6 Viola’s friendship with Fausto Maria Martini led to a theatrical collaboration: the

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discernible in L’altro volto che ride—one of Viola’s earliest literary efforts and his sole collection of poetry (Viola 1909). Although a crepuscular imprint dominates this poetic pastiche, it is also permeated by a Symbolist tinge of Baudelairian derivation, while drawing on both the inimitable linguistic bravura of D’Annunzio and the prosaic versification of Sergio Corazzini and Enrico Thovez.7 When Viola turned his creative attentions to Pricò (his first and, from both a critical and commercial perspective, most successful novel), he continued to draw on the twilight poets (in particular, Martini and Marino Moretti) whose lessons imbue the text with crepuscular sensibility.

Pricò Serialized in Nuova Antologia in 1923, Pricò was published by Mondadori the following year.8 The text was somewhat of an anomaly for its time. Stories that were ignored and denied by an indifferent adult world, that elevated children to the status of moral judges, were not new to European literature. The literary production of the 19th century is replete with examples of child-centered narratives, from Charles Dickens to Leo Tolstoy. Moreover, Florence Montgomery’s Misunderstood (1869), an innovative exploration of child psychology, achieved remarkable commercial success in Italy.9 Remaining within the textual confines of the peninsula, Viola had several felicitous experimental narratives on which to draw. For example, Luigi Bertelli’s popular children’s literature novel, Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca, endowed the child protagonist with the authorial voice through the guise of diary entries, while Luciano Zuccoli’s one-act play Mattutino, which had its premiere on 16 December 1907. 7 Luigi Scorrano suggests that Walt Whitman’s verse also served as a poetic model for L’altro volto che ride. See Scorrano 1996, 10. 8 Pricò was published in four installments in Nuova Antologia 58.1230 (16 June 1923): 320—333; 58.1231 (1 July 1923): 62—74; 58.1232 (16 July 1923): 138— 152; 58.1233 (1 Aug. 1923): 225—240, before appearing in volume format by the Mondadori publishing house in 1924. The publisher Fratelli Treves released a new edition in 1929. Mondadori then published a third edition both to compliment and to capitalize on the release of the film I bambini ci guardano. To wit, the third edition (1943) is titled Pricò: I bambini ci guardano. Distribution problems delayed the film’s release until 1944. 9 Sofia Albini translated Montgomery’s novel into Italian as Incompreso (Milan: A. Brigola) in 1881. It enjoyed considerable commercial success undergoing seven editions through 1918. Three more editions, including a new translation by Emilia Franceschini (Firenze: Salani, 1919), followed through 1924. Luigi Comencini’s 1966 film Incompreso was an adaptation of the homonymous novel.

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collection of stories, L’occhio del fanciullo. Episodi tratti dalle memorie della fanciullezza, sought to visualize the world from a child’s perspective.10 Viola’s decision to filter the narrative through the eyes of a child did not put him at odds with the leading literary luminaries of the early 20th century, many of whom contributed to the development and the dissemination of children’s literature.11 What differentiated his literary strategy from those of his contemporaries was that he did not approach childhood as a metaphor, but rather situated it within specific social circumstances, as a foundational stage in the development of the human condition. Pricò predates any tendency towards the cinematografizzazione of literature; however, it is a portent of the theatricalization of narrative.12 For if, in broad terms, literature is diegetic and film is mimetic, then theatre strikes an uneasy balance between the two modes of aesthetic representation, by both relating and performing the discourse for the audience. By employing a nondescript linguistic register devoid of elevated or rhetorical excesses, Viola was drawing on his crepuscular influences as well as on his theatrical experiences. The narrative’s sixteen short chapters, which are dialogue-intensive, are subdivided into distinct scenes, averaging less than a page in length. Resembling the sparse though direct language of stage directions, rather than the dialogic richness of the modern novel, the diegesis proper is divested of descriptors and replete with indicators. In other words, Pricò is, albeit contradictorily so, a phonocentric text. By way of synopsis, Pricò is a five-year-old boy whose identity is effaced. He is denied a proper name despite his abhorrence for the 10

Bertelli, under the pseudonym Vamba, published Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca, which was modeled on Metta Victoria Fuller’s novel, A Bad Boy’s Diary (1880), in serialized form between 7 February 1907 and 17 May 1908. The publishing house Bemporad released it in volume format in 1920. See Zuccoli, Luciano. 1914. L’occhio del fanciullo. Episodi tratti dalle memorie della fanciullezza. Milan: Treves. Nom de plume of Luciano Von Ingenheim (Calprino, Canton Ticino 1868 -Paris 1929), Zuccoli is remembered today less for his novels and more for the transposition of his stories to film including L’edera senza quercia (directed by Suzanne Armelle in 1918), Kiff Tebby (directed by Mario Camerini in 1928), La freccia nel fianco (directed by Alberto Lattuada in 1945), and Divina creatura (directed by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi in 1975). 11 By way of example, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Giovanni Pascoli, Grazia Deledda, Edmondo De Amicis all contributed to the popular children’s magazine Il giornalino della domenica, which Luigi Bertelli had founded in 1906. 12 Vito Attolini (1988) refers to the cinematografizzazione of literature in his study of cinematographic adaptations.

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‘precocious’ appellative. His budding sexual awareness, which manifests itself in a morbid attachment to his mother, compounds his anxiety and isolation. One morning he awakes to find that his mother, Nina, has gone. Unbeknownst to him, she has run away with Arturo, a family acquaintance. Pricò is sent to his grandmother’s, where his cousin Paolina serves as a surrogate mother in the boy’s fantasies. Her sexual attraction is directed towards another, which leads to Pricò accidentally knocking a flowerpot onto her head. Following this Freudian slip-up, he is sent home and subsequently becomes quite ill. Concern for his health reunites the parents. To move beyond the past they plan a seaside vacation, but Nina cannot leave the past behind her. When her husband returns to work, Nina resumes her relationship with Arturo. Abandoned for a second time, the father sends Pricò to a boarding school and then commits suicide. The setting is neither geographically nor temporally specified, but instead remains generic. It is any Italian urban space; it is any year within the last decade or so. What matters is the ambience: a wretched petitbourgeois existence set within those cinereous soporific years that surround and include the Great War. While at first the characters’ familial life appears to be firmly entrenched in bourgeois values (family, motherhood, duty, friendship, etc.), these principles are soon exposed as façades of respectability behind which primal needs, drives, and desires continue to exist unfettered. Pricò exposes the hypocrisy with an explicitness that I bambini ci guardano lacks. Viola’s narrative underscores the child’s confusion. Pricò is never quite aware or sure of what is going on around him. When Nina first runs off with Arturo, Pricò is oblivious as to her whereabouts. Only on an unconscious level, manifested in his dreams and actions, does he demonstrate cognizance of the familial crisis. The father, who, through the child’s eyes, at first appears cold and distant, reveals his warmth and devotion as well as his weakness and ineptitude—the latter a theme dear to the crepuscular poets. The mother, who, through the child’s eyes is warm and devoted, appears cold and distant. She is aggressively pursuing a liberating lifestyle. Nina’s discontentedness is augmented by the stifling presence of Pricò, whose overbearing need for attention is too much for her to handle. Nina yearns for something different from the stuporous, monotonous life she leads. Such an existence is too great a price to pay for the safety and stability it provides her. The text is not insensitive to Nina’s plight, but Viola is not Sibilla Aleramo, and Pricò is not Una donna. The novel’s concluding line, separated from the body of the text, serves as an unequivocal moral epilogue: “And then you meet men who at twenty years of age appear one hundred” (Viola 1943, 215). No forgiveness, no

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forgetting: the child has been scarred for life. With such an uncompromising conclusion, Pricò hardly appeared to be suitable source material for a director of De Sica’s pedigree.

Genesis of I bambini ci guardano Although De Sica’s previous cinematic efforts had little in common with Viola’s narrative, nevertheless his directorial transition from bittersweet social comedies to a family tragedy was not incongruous from an extra-cinematic standpoint. In 1942, De Sica was living his own familial crisis when he left his wife Giuditta Rissone to live with María Mercader, whom he had met on the set of Un garibaldino al convento (1942). That same year, he directed a stage production of Pirandello’s Liolà (1916), a comedy that punctures the pompous pretenses of society’s norms. Moreover, in January of 1942, De Sica re-read Pricò, apparently at the suggestion of Adolfo Franci, and was intrigued by the possibilities the text offered (Franci 1942, 14).13 In an interview conducted while still filming I bambini ci guardano, the director described what attracted him to the project: Due dozzine di rose scarlatte, Maddalena zero in condotta and the others: all films that I recall with great affection; but for some time I had been looking for something more. So I went to Pricò almost as if he were calling me, as if I were being drawn by something stronger than me. Perhaps because I felt within me the overwhelming need to understand the suffering of a young soul who, at the sudden collapse of his interior world, comes into contact with the outside reality. How each of us would behave differently if we were always aware and thought about the fact that the children are watching us, they hear us, they understand us, at times above and beyond our own understanding of ourselves and of our plights… (Crispolti 1942, 62).

The nexus of the personal and the theatrical along with the felicitous discovery of a poignant literary text, whose very structure and language bespoke the screen, provided the ways and means to explore new cinematic territory. Adolfo Franci, one of the screenwriters of the film, as well as a regular contributor to the magazine Primi Piani. Mensile del cinema, documented the process of bringing Viola’s text to the screen in an article, “I ragazzi vi 13

Moreover, it was precisely while working on Liolà that De Sica discovered Luciano De Ambrosis, a four-year-old boy who was acting in the play and who had recently lost his mother.

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guardano” (Franci 1942, 14—15). According to Franci, De Sica was searching for a subject that was different from his usual sentimental comedy fare. Pricò remained an abstract inspiration until April, when De Sica entered into serious discussions with producers in Rome.14 For commercial reasons, Scalera Film wanted to change the title. Viola, who was less interested in preserving the story than in retaining the title, vehemently resisted any such attempt. Oreste Biancoli, acting as a gobetween on behalf of Michele Scalera, eventually broke the impasse and persuaded Viola to concede to the change. Even before the name-change went into effect, or before a serviceable script had been drafted, promotional material began to appear. Lidia C. Ripandelli, the assistant director on the set, signed one of the earliest publicity articles for the film: “I will now tell everyone that your [Vittorio De Sica] next film will be based on the story Pricò by C. G. Viola, that you wish to have absolute freedom in casting and that after Pricò you will engage in a dramatic film. Very good. Remember that we are counting on you: it is too early [in your career] to allow people to think that sentimental comedies are the only type of film that you can make” (Ripandelli 1942, 35). While she did not acknowledge her participation in the project, Ripandelli’s announcement prepared audiences for a film, which even at this early stage, promised to differ from De Sica’s usual fare. Credit for the film’s title apparently goes to Zavattini, who, at De Sica’s house, suggested the name “I ragazzi vi guardano” even before tackling the script (Franci 1942, 14). Inspiration for the title, which was then modified to the ominous “I bambini ci guardano” came from the name of a column written by Zavattini. Za’s early involvement in the project cemented the collaboration between himself and De Sica: I would not describe De Sica as a screenwriter, as a creator of stories, but since he is a real director he would respond to the text with perhaps just a yes or a no, but this response summed up his intuitive reaction. At the time of I bambini ci guardano he said of me: ‘This is my man!’ Imagine that: someone like me who was pushy by nature. A Florentine friend of his, Adolfo Franci, had proposed a story called Pricò from which we drew I bambini ci guardano. It was perhaps the most beautiful piece that Cesare Giulio Viola had written, who in other contexts was not my author. I was, 14

I bambini ci guardano was a joint production by Scalera Film and Invicta Film. Scalera Film S.p.a. produced and distributed 86 films during its 12 year run from 1938 to 1950. Invicta Film produced only 4 films of which I bambini ci guardano was the second in its 4 years of existence (1942-1945). Franco Magli produced the film.

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however, able to appreciate its sympathetic qualities as well as its cinematographic ones—a simple, direct, elementary story, an excellent story. Vittorio had already begun to gather round his usual collaborators. The title ‘I bambini ci guardano’ was mine; I believe that it came from the rubric of a magazine… (Zavattini 1979, 56—57).15

The usual collaborators to whom Zavattini referred were Franci, Margherita Maglione, and Gherardo Gherardi, to whom were added Viola and the uncredited, Maria Doxelofer.16 Zavattini went on to declare that working on the screenplay for I bambini ci guardano, “…was the most important stage in the evolution of my career as a filmmaker, and even in my career as a human being…” (De Santi 1999, 35). For his part, De Sica looked back on that collaboration as a decisive point in his career: In 1942, Zavattini and I got together to make I bambini ci guardano. I had already completed a few comedies—Maddalena...zero in condotta. Teresa Venerdì, Un garibaldino al convento—which had enjoyed success. I had thought: now I have enough clout to make a serious film. I know very well, and I knew it back then as well, that I bambini ci guardano was a compromise between the old and the new formula. At any rate, for Zavattini and me, it was a crucial experience, after which we sat around for a year doing nothing… (De Sica 1954).

While I bambini ci guardano marked the formal beginning of their collaboration, the two had already worked together. Their first encounter most likely dates back to 1935 on the set of Darò un milione, which starred De Sica and was based on a story by Zavattini and Giaci Mondaini. Later, De Sica solicited Za’s assistance on the script for Teresa Venerdì— although the latter’s contribution went uncredited. In other words, by the time the two began to collaborate on I bambini ci guardano, they had already developed a working rapport. The elaboration of the screenplay did not begin until early May 1942, when De Sica assembled his writing troupe in Milan at the home of Maglione. Here, according to Franci’s precious testimony: 15

The column to which Zavattini refers is “I vostri bambini vi guardano” which appeared in Grazia 1 (1 March 1938). 16 For Adolfo Franci, I bambini ci guardano was his fourth film and his third working with Vittorio De Sica. Prior to I bambini ci guardano, Margherita Maglione had worked on five film sets, which, with the exception of one (Un pilota ritorna), all involved Vittorio De Sica. Gherardo Gherardi had already written or co-written some 5 screenplays when he joined De Sica’s équipe to work on Pricò; moreover, he was also in the process of completing what would be his sole directorial effort, Il nostro prossimo, which premiered on 26 February 1943.

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With Eyes Wide Shut: From Pricò to I bambini ci guardano The work usually proceeded in the following manner: together we would outline the scenes that Margherita Maglione and Viola would then develop. They would divide the scenes and lay out the first draft of dialogue. Once everything was on paper, we would go through it and discuss everything part by part, scene by scene, and character by character. At that point De Sica would take charge of all the film’s story parts; he would put himself in the characters’ shoes by imitating their gestures and repeating their words to get a feel for their precise range. It was a free performance for the few, but extremely attentive, spectators—four in number—to which Margherita Maglione’s courteous and lively maid was sometimes added (Franci 1942, 14).

Thanks to Viola’s tireless efforts and willingness to re-work Pricò, De Sica had the first draft of the screenplay ready by mid-June. He then returned to Rome where, in early July, work began on the definitive script. It was during this second phase of elaboration that Zavattini put his unmistakable imprint on the text. By mid-August De Sica had the final draft in his hands, so that in September he was able to shoot the Alassio sequence.17 Franci’s chronology of the production of the film, including the timetable he lays out, is remarkably accurate. Where his prediction and reality diverge is the release date: “And in November, if everything goes smoothly, Pricò will appear on the screen” (Franci, 1942 14). If everything goes smoothly, is the rub, for apparently, nothing went smoothly when it came to releasing I bambini ci guardano. De Sica was still shooting in early 1943, and the film did not clear the censorship office until August 19, 1943—right in the midst of Pietro Badoglio’s 45-day long government. With Italy divided, Scalera Film moved to Venice, and with the company went the film. The political events that ensued delayed the première until 27 October 1944.18

17

According to the column “Corrispondenza a tutti i teatri” in Primi Piani. Mensile del cinema 2.9 (September 1942), De Sica was shooting in Alassio in September. 18 In the fall of 1943, German forces transported Scalera Film’s production facilities to Venice—the cinematic capital of the Italian Social Republic. According to Luciano De Ambrosis (1999, 17), who played the part of Pricò, Scalera held the first public screening of I bambini ci guardano in Venice in December 1943. For the Venice screening, De Sica’s name was removed from the credits in retaliation for his having refused the invitation of the Minister of Popular Culture, Fernando Mezzasoma, to take the reins of the RSI’s film industry.

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The Language of I bambini ci guardano The political climate not only dictated the film’s release, but was also a determining factor in how the film sounded. With the advent of the talkies, which was inaugurated for Italian film production on October 6, 1930 by the première of Gennaro Righelli’s La canzone dell’amore, the question of linguistic autarchy entered the realm of cinema. Prompted by a strict identification between language and nation, the government was proactive in legislating linguistic priorities for the promotion and purity of the national language. While political interventions regarding the use of foreign words pre-dated Mussolini’s regime, the 1930s witnessed a shift from a relatively closed deliberation among specialists to a public debate that was amply represented in the popular press. Legislation passed between 1934 and 1942, indicates the extreme measures taken to preserve linguistic purity: the banning of foreign words in newspapers, on signs, for names of shows, for names of Italian companies or products, for children’s names, etc. As for the film industry, specific legislation regarding language use was limited to foreign productions. Censorship prevented imports from using foreign dialogues, as it had done previously for intertitles, and, as of 1933, it required that all films be dubbed into Italian by Italians. Such measures augmented censorial control over foreign materials while providing protectionist support to the national industry. So while imported films, since 1930, could not contain any foreign dialogue, nothing prevented Italian films from inserting foreign dialogues into the scripts. In I bambini ci guardano those who use foreign words tend to be associated with the leisured-class. Andrea’s colleague, with his ridiculous “au contraire” and “au revoir” becomes the butt of the other bank-clerks’ jokes. Rather than celebrate the escapist mythology of what Gian Piero Brunetta calls “cinema déco,” the linguistic exoticisms tended to brand their enunciators (and by extension their social classes) as both morally and physically corrupt (Brunetta 2003). While refinement and elegance are symbolic of corruption in the cinema of the period, the less refined characters lack redeeming elements to counter the underlying suggestion that contemporary society is trapped in a downward spiral. The sparse use of exoticisms in I bambini ci guardano is consistent with contemporaneous films, which, with respect to the previous decade, witnessed a sharp decline in the use of foreign words and an increase in alternative autarchic linguistic forms.19 19

For a compelling analysis of film dialogue under Fascism, see Ruffin 1997.

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With Eyes Wide Shut: From Pricò to I bambini ci guardano

Linguistic autarchy also extended to the use of the formal pronouns “Lei” and “Voi” in film dialogue. As late as 1937, the use of “Lei” went relatively unchallenged, but in 1938, “Voi” emerged as the preferred pronoun, indeed, the sole acceptable form.20 Although film was not specifically targeted by the ensuing legislation, producers and directors conformed immediately to the new directive. While in all likelihood modes of address in daily conversations did not change for the vast majority of Italians, the use of “Lei” in any public capacity now suggested a distinctly antifascist position.21 Although not released until well after the liberation of Rome, I bambini ci guardano adheres to the letter to this interdiction. Given the time lag between the film’s preparation and its release, the cost of re-dressing the dialogue would have been prohibitive. Nevertheless, the lack of a decree banning the use of “Lei,” the subject matter of the film (where the “Lei” form would function much like the use of foreign words), and its literary source material would have provided ample justification for the appropriation of the form for those inclined to go beyond the pale of Fascism.22 Of course, Pricò adhered to the linguistic mores of 1923, and therefore freely adopted the use of “Lei.” That De Sica was sensitive to this issue appears to gain credence from the fact that four and a half months later his next feature film, La porta del cielo, which was again scripted by Franci and Zavattini among others, returned to a pre1938 idiomatic use of the two formal pronouns, The other linguistic arena that was subject to government censure was that of dialects. Statistics regarding the use of dialects during the ventennio are lacking, but as late as 1951, 80% of Italians used a dialect on a habitual basis, while 60% considered it their primary language.23 Given these 20

An article by Bruno Cicognani, “L’abolizione del Lei,” which appeared in the daily Corriere della sera on 15 January 1938, catalyzed this turnabout. He called for the purgation of “Lei” from the national idiolect because it represented “centuries of servitude and abjection.” Within weeks “Lei” was supplanted with “Voi” by proscription government youth organizations, the National Fascist Party, schools, the military, public offices, and the press. See Raffaelli 1993, 2061— 2073. 21 On the use of “Lei” as a symbol of antifascism as well as the use of “Voi” as a sign of consensus toward the regime, see Salvatorelli (1970, 395). 22 Although rare, the isolated use of the “Lei” form is not without precedent in post-1938 films: Vedova (1939), Scarpe grosse (1940), Segreto di villa Paradiso (1940), Compagnia della teppa (1941), Se non son matti non li vogliamo (1941), Canal Grande (1943), Harlem (1943), and La casa senza tempo (1943, but released in 1945). 23 For a linguistic analysis of 20th century Italy, see De Mauro 1991. For an essential survey of the use of dialect in film, see Raffaelli 1983 and 1992.

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figures, the government’s ability to legislate and to enforce dialect restrictions, on a practical level, was tenuous at best. Throughout the 1930s, films were populated by stock characters whose defining traits were inextricably linked to their idiolects. Linguistic bricolage was an aesthetic affectation rather than a political effect. I bambini ci guardano, where a smattering of dialect provides colour and pseudo-realism to the environment, belongs to this cinematic tradition. This pastiche approach to linguistic diversity is a far cry from the central position that marginalized voices would assume in the celebrated films of the immediate post-war period. The dialect voice in I bambini ci guardano is most conspicuous in the Alassio sequences. The fashionable seaside resort reveals itself to be shorn of that elegant grandeur dreamt up by the petit-bourgeois imaginary, and instead to be frequented by the very people who populate the drab existence of their everyday lives. In both the dining and “bocce” scenes, the infusion of Bolognese expressions draws attention to the mundane environment.24 The bourgeoisie’s escapist dream to live, albeit for a fleeting moment, with no regard for the ways and means, alongside their perceived social betters, proved as pathetically illusory as the magician, Gabrielli’s, bromidic sleight-of-hand. In Pricò, which is devoid of an explicit dialect presence, these scenes are rendered indirectly: “There, in the dining hall, the commercial travelers gather every evening at a long table, and they eat, and they drink, and they tell funny stories in dialect” (Viola 1943, 122). Once again, the novel’s diegesis assumes a theatrical posturing that the reader is forced to flesh out, in order to achieve a semblance of the Barthesian reality effect. Within the film one sequence does incorporate dialect in a realistic manner: Pricò’s flight from Alassio, which is the exposition of what amounts to a gloss in the novel, introduces a railway worker who addresses the child in the local Ligurian dialect, as well as a drunkard who slurs at the boy in an indecipherable dialect. Another situation in which the use of dialect would have been entirely appropriate to the environment, but which is completely lacking instead, is when Pricò stays at his grandmother’s house in the country. In such a rural setting, the standard Italian language, bereft of regionalisms, rings false and artificial. In other words, I bambini ci guardano is typical of the films made in those years where the few dialect speakers present are elderly men who portray secondary characters.

24 Moreover, the other players constantly chastise the corpulent man from Bologna to “speak in Italian.”

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With Eyes Wide Shut: From Pricò to I bambini ci guardano

I bambini ci guardano Not only does the film derive much of its dialogue from Pricò, but, apart from superficial variations, I bambini ci guardano derives its narrative organization from the novel as well. The film’s synopsis is but a variant of the synopsis of the novel. Pricò is a five-year-old boy who witnesses and lives, with desperate awareness, his parent’s conjugal crisis. One day while playing in the park, he spies his mother, Nina, speaking with a family acquaintance, Roberto. The next morning he is awakened by his father, Andrea, and the maid, Agnese: his mother has left. Pricò is first taken to his aunt’s shop and then to his grandmother’s home in the country. After accidentally knocking a flowerpot onto his cousin’s head, he is sent back to his father. Pricò then becomes violently sick, and it is through his illness that the parents are able to reach reconciliation. It is, however, is short lived. While the family is on vacation in Alassio, Roberto returns. Nina, unable to resist her desires, flees with him a second time. Andrea, devastated, enrols Pricò in a boarding school and then commits suicide. The narrative underwent a series of spatio-temporal alterations to achieve its cinematic vestments. In the novel, the dramatic material unfolds in the private domain, while in the film it is laundered in the public sphere. From the opening conversation shouted across the courtyard to the park sequence, the public space is emphasized while the private space is negated. Even within the confines of the home, the front door proves an inadequate barrier for keeping the obnoxiously curious neighbors at bay. In this petit-bourgeois world, everyone is watching. The setting’s temporal suturing produces a concomitant spatial transformation in the individual’s relationship to a society, where the personal is a translucent sham sewn over the social fabric of Fascist Italy. This hermeneutic shift stitches together the story, which in Pricò was limited to the environs of inter-familial relationships, into the material of history in I bambini ci guardano, where the individual crisis is but a symptom of the social crisis. The literary and filmic texts are remarkably similar in structure, but markedly divergent in tone. Pricò has an undefined setting which lends itself well to the “cinema deco” tradition. The specificity of Rome (e.g., the exteriors in Piazza Zama and Villa Borghese) and Alassio are secondary to the setting of I bambini ci guardano compared to their respective representational values as an urban centre and a bourgeois retreat. The temporal setting remains ambiguous, but is relatively

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contemporaneous to the shooting of the film.25 In the representations of the familial triad, however, the two texts differ. In his interview with Clemente Crispolti, De Sica had claimed that in the transposition from book to film, the characters had remained the same with the exception of the mother: “Except for the softening of the mother’s character, they all remained the same; Pricò, the dad and the lover are unchanged” (Crispolti 1942, 62). Certainly Nina’s personality and her motivations are presented in a very different light, but those of the other three characters undergo modifications as well. Throughout Pricò, while Nina is stifled by the oppressive omnipresence of her son and longs for the freedom that a young woman, in her view, should enjoy, in I bambini ci guardano, Nina’s maternal sentiments are on constant display. Indeed Nina and Roberto are both presented, without explicit moral judgment, as two people overwhelmed by their passion. The sequence in which Roberto visits Nina at home vividly illustrates how she is torn between two lovers: Roberto and Pricò. In trying to convince Nina to run away with him, Roberto becomes violent. Pricò, alarmed at the shouting, rushes to protect his mother and is knocked to the ground by Roberto. Nina clutches her son and asks if he is all right, but her gaze, as she pronounces these words, is directed at Roberto. In fact, Roberto’s unhappiness draws out the compassion of Nina’s sister and, perhaps, even that of Agnese. He remains a secondary character whose actions draw no direct condemnation from anyone other than Nina. Andrea, on the other hand, comes across as emasculated and inept— hardly a satisfying model of the new Fascist man. When the audience is introduced to him, he is sitting at the dining table watering down his wine, as one would for a child, and lamenting that he will be late for the condominium meeting. He consoles himself with the thought that the meeting cannot possibly start without him, but of course, the camera cuts to the reunion where an animated discussion has long been underway. After Nina has left for a second time, Andrea, who was in the midst of hanging curtains, again displays his lack of fortitude when with tearful eyes, he begs Pricò to come sleep in the matrimonial bed: “Come, come with me. Don’t leave me alone. I can’t remain alone…” In essence, he exchanges roles with his son: the child who should seek solace from the adult is instead forced to comfort the father. Repeatedly he defers to 25 The fashion displayed as well as the song “Maramao perché sei morto?” (which is playing in the background when Andrea discovers that his wife has left him for a second time) date the action between 1939 and 1942. Of course, the film is devoid of any references to the war so that the specificity of the setting is at odds with the social-political reality.

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Agnese’s authority, which, in a clever casting gambit, is extremely efficacious because Giovanna Cigoli is, in fact, the mother of Emilio Cigoli. The great beard and cold indifference of the father, in the novel, have melted into an anemic moustache and humanely pathetic Andrea in the film. The introduction of Pricò’s literary persona begins with his name: “Pricò… Why did they call him Pricò today in aunt Berelli’s house?” (Viola 1943, 11). Throughout the novel the child is never referred to by his given name; the appellative is a leit-motif that draws attention to the boy’s confusion, in terms of both his own identity and his relation to the adult world. A stunted Bildungsroman, Pricò explores the budding sexual awareness of its homonymous protagonist as he grapples with his parents’ marital crisis. Viola’s interest in Freud is evident in Pricò’s morbid attachment to the mother, although the exploration of the boy’s Oedipal conflict remains tentative. The child watches, but never quite comprehends the machinations that surround him. The cinematic Pricò is much more aware than his literary counterpart of what is happening around him. He never questions his own identity; instead he focuses his gaze outward. From the moment that he spies his mother speaking with Roberto in the park, he senses that something is awry. While he obviously cares deeply for his mother, he does not display a morbid oppressive attraction towards her. Nor does he display animosity towards his father. Instead, he watches. He watches and acts within the confines of a child’s limitations. At the conclusion of Pricò, the boy ignores his mother’s plea for forgiveness, but does not understand why she is beseeching him: “But he didn’t understand: he was squeezing Agnese’s hand and wasn’t crying” (Viola 1943, 215). At the conclusion of I bambini ci guardano, the boy ignores his mother who calls him by his appellative and walks away, much in the same way his father had done, with tears streaming down his face, in the previous boarding school scene. The director of the school comments that “It is a terrible blow for a child. These are things that can influence one throughout one’s life…” Pricò understands. While adultery and suicide were perhaps acceptable topics in literature under Fascism, they remained taboo in film. On the screen, extra-marital affairs were limited to the upper classes and set in a cosmopolitan and distant Budapest, which shared no relation to reality. In an interview with Viola in 1942, the journalist Paola Ojetti put forward an interpretation of the film conforming to the political ideals of the regime: Viola says that Pricò will be a great film. He is working on it every day with De Sica and Mrs. Maglione and he admires their experience and selection of screenwriters. He knows that De Sica will give Pricò all of his

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tenderness (let’s not forget that De Sica is a father, not just a director and actor) and that he will be thrilled to select the young protagonist for his film, to play opposite Isa Pola, who will, in all likelihood, interpret the adulterous mother. And Viola has every right to be excited. Cinema is our most powerful means of education. If his film will educate mothers, then Pricò will be a masterpiece… (Ojetti 1942, 7).

Although there is most likely a time lag between the interview and the publication of the article since by July of 1942, the definitive title of the film was in place, Ojetti’s explication indicates the sensitivity with which such social topics needed to be handled. To address adultery, without falling into facile cuckold humour, constitutes a daring novelty.26 The film does introduce the theme in a comic manner through the Punch-and-Judy sequence, but the laughter is bitter-sweet and sets the stage for the concluding sequence. When Pricò turns his back on his mother, he turns his back on his past. The future towards which he walks, promises to be both difficult and painful. It is, however, the only possible path for him to take. Such gestures lend themselves to political interpretations, and the film is political to the extent that it reflected social problems and criticised the middle-class. Zavattini’s hand is most acutely felt in his re-working of Viola’s crepuscular sensibility into an anti-bourgeois leit-motif. Zavattini’s velvet-cosh touch is apparent in the extraordinary melancholy with which the narrative unfolds.27 One-liners such as the neighbor’s sardonic barb that for her “…the elevator is also a de-elevator…” bare the imprint of his humour, as do the juxtapositions that emphasize the cultural vacuum of the middle-class (e.g., homes without books, the bored disinterest of Riccardo Fellini’s character, squabbling over the elevator, pursuing unaffordable but fashionable vacations, etc.). The scenes that he writes into the script (e.g., the condominium meeting, the nosy neighbor, the vulgar clientele of the seamstress aunt, the depressing yet snobbish seaside resort, the entertainment at the hotel, Roberto and Nina’s seaside mawkishness, the ridiculous names and babble of the social effete in Alassio) transform the 26

Francesco Pasinetti’s 1934 film, Il canale degli Angeli also concerns an adulterous relationship with a child as silent witness. It tells the story of a sailor who takes a job in Venice while waiting for his ship to depart. He meets a married woman and begins to have an affair with her. Her young son senses what is happening and becomes ill. Social order is restored, however, when the sailor leaves. 27 In her thesis, Nicoletta Ballati (1998) analyzes the screenplay and concludes that Zavattini’s contribution was fundamental to the shooting script of I bambini ci guardano.

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personal crisis into a social crisis. The private drama limited to the environs of inter-familial relations has now become a public scene that encompasses all of society. His story becomes history. Early reviewers certainly interpreted the film as a political breath of fresh air. In Antonio Pietrangeli’s assessment: “If there is a lesson to draw from this film, it is to start to open our eyes on the world, on the infinite changing reality in which we live, on the lives of the people that surround us. However from this, there follows another lesson, an invitation to be serious and conscientious, qualities of which our cinema, today, is in great need.”28 (Pietrangeli 1945) Indeed, the cinematic narrative emphasizes this crisis in which society appears to be lacking any moral references. The Alassio sequence, in particular, underscores this crisis, while simultaneously sustaining a radical moral critique of cinema in the 1930s—a critique that necessarily encompasses De Sica’s whole artistic career as both an actor and a director. As Andrea’s colleague with the natty moustache murmurs: “Society, society, how many crimes are committed in your name?”

Marketing I bambini ci guardano Of course the society that is critiqued is the same one to whom the film is directed. A copious series of articles and advertisements in popular trade magazines promoted the impending release of I bambini ci guardano. In particular, the monthly magazine Primi Piani. Mensile del cinema, served as the outlet for the film’s publicity campaign. Whether in the form of interviews, notes, or advertisements, the magazine’s coverage of the film was extensive. Ripandelli and especially Franci were active promoters of the film—a fact which is hardly surprising, given their personal investment in its success. A premature full-page advertisement ran in Primi Piani in late 1942, when the film’s imminent release still appeared possible.29 In an effort to keep the film in the public eye, Franci also contributed an article on the young protagonist, Luciano De Ambrosis, in the spring of 1943 (Franci 1943, 12—13). In addition to appearing in several full-page promotions, Isa Pola graced the cover of the October 28

Other early reviewers include Alberto Blandi (1944), Raul Radice (1944), Eugenio F. Calmieri (1944), and Pier Luigi Melani (1945). 29 See Primi Piani. Mensile del cinema 2.11-12 (December 1942): 4. Other prerelease articles include “I bambini ci guardano” in Lo Schermo (September 1942); “Il bambino …che vi guarderà” in Italia (5 December 1942); O. Campassi, “Motivo di un successo” in Cinema 1.17 (March 1943); “Il programma della Scalera” in L’Arcobaleno (22 June 1943).

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1943 issue with the caption “…Isa Pola, star of the film I bambini ci guardano directed by Vittorio De Sica and produced by Scalera.”30 Three months later, an “up-close-and-personal” feature appeared, in which the actress is described as having “already finished shooting a film, I bambini ci guardano directed by De Sica, that promises much: a film that could mean something for this year’s current production.”31 (De Francio 1943, 27) The publicity campaign for I bambini ci guardano was intimately tied to the promotion of Viola’s novel. To coincide with the release of the film, Mondadori published a third edition that came out in 1943. Since the two texts no longer shared the same name, the author and publisher opted for the modified title of Pricò: I bambini ci guardano, which would eliminate any confusion as to the tie-in. Moreover, all publicity posters explicitly stated that the film was “based on the novel Pricò by C. G. Viola.” In addition, almost all articles and reviews that addressed I bambini ci guardano made direct reference to Pricò. Both Viola and De Sica were prominent figures within their respective fields so that each one’s work benefited from the other’s presence: the film revived Viola’s text, and the novel added cachet to De Sica’s film.

Pricò: I bambini ci guardano The twenty-year generational gap between Pricò and I bambini ci guardano facilitated the transposition from the written page to the silver screen. The novel’s crepuscular tone, perhaps also influenced by the sociopolitical mood of the country, following the Treaty of Versailles and the March on Rome, lent itself to an explicit social critique within the sociopolitical reality of war-torn Italy. Although the “reelpolitik” remains muted, the unapologetic projection of a story (albeit one that ignores contemporary events), that in the past had received a very different type of treatment, was certainly unfamiliar to audiences. The modest commercial success of I bambini ci guardano can perhaps, in part, be attributed to its delayed general release, which made the film’s subject matter appear all the more irrelevant to a public that was suffering the ravages of war. For an audience that found itself with few political options beyond waiting and seeing, the possibility of establishing spectator identification with the protagonist may have existed, but I bambini ci guardano does not 30

See the cover illustration of Primi Piani. Mensile del cinema e della moda 3.810 (October 1943). The caption appears on page 7. 31 A full-page photograph accompanies the article.

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succeed in forging this nexus. Lengthy tracking shots and shot-countershot sequences visually reinforce the film’s title, but they fail to engage the audience because they draw too much attention to themselves. The camera follows Pricò, and the viewer watches the watcher. Judgment remains suspended, however, because both the intra-diegetic gaze and the eye of the camera are constant reminders that this social drama features strong versus weak, and not right versus wrong. The struggle is Darwinian rather than moral. Whether the child’s defiant closing gesture suffices to make him one of the fit, remains a moot point. Although Pricò’s filmic gaze, which fails to transcend the frame of the screen, is more worldweary than his literary one, it is also ultimately blurred by tears. I bambini ci guardano succeeds in translating the private plight of Pricò into a public crisis, but it flinches under the gaze of history.

Works Cited Attolini, Vito. 1988. Dal romanzo al set. Cinema italiano dalle origini ad oggi. Bari: Dedalo. Ballati, Nicoletta. 1998. La nascita di un nuovo autore: “I bambini ci guardano,” diss. Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia della “Sapienza” di Roma. Bernardini, Aldo, ed. 1992. Il cinema sonoro 1930-1969. Rome: ANICA. Berezin, Mabel. 1994. Cultural Form and Political Meaning: Statesubsidized Theater, Ideology, and the Language of Style in Fascist Italy. American Journal of Sociology 99, 5: 1237—1286. Blandi, Alberto. 1944. “I bambini ci guardano” di Vittorio De Sica. La Stampa, November 4. Brunetta, Gian Piero. 2003. Guida alla storia del cinema italiano (19052003). Turin: Einaudi. Bruni, David. 2006. Sceneggiatura e sceneggiatori. In Storia del cinema italiano. 1934/1939. Vol. 5, ed. Orio Caldiron, 413—29. Venice: Marsilio Editore. Calmieri, Eugenio F. 1944. Le maschere e le immagini. “I bambini ci guardano.” L’illustrazione italiana 71, 51, December 17. Cicognani, Bruno. 1938. L’abolizione del Lei. Corriere della sera, January 15. Cosulich, Callisto. 1961. “Il latte e il caffé,” La fiera del cinema, January 1. Crispolti, Clemente. 1942. Mentre si gira “I bambini ci guardano.” Primi Piani 121: 62. De Ambrosis, Luciano. 1999. Quando ero Pricò. In I bambini ci guardano di Vittorio De Sica: testimonianze, interventi, sceneggiatura, ed.

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Gualtiero De Santi and Manuel De Sica, 17. Rome: Editoriale Pantheon. De Francio, Umberto. 1943. Isa Pola da diva ad attrice. Primi Piani. 3, 1: 27. De Mauro, Tullio. 1991. Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita. Bari-Rome: Laterza. De Santi, Gualtiero. 1999. La cognizione del dolore. I bambini ci guardano di Vittorio De Sica: testimonianze, interventi, sceneggiatura, eds. Gualtiero De Santi and Manuel De Sica. Rome: Editoriale Pantheon. De Sica, Vittorio. Untitled. 1954. Tempo illustrato, December 16. Franci, Adolfo. 1942. I ragazzi vi guardano. Primi Piani 2, 6: 14. —. 1943. Presentazione di Luciano. Primi Piani 3, 3: 12—13. Frateili, Arnaldo. 1962. Cesare Giulio Viola. Enciclopedia dello Spettacolo. Rome: Le Maschere. Gandin, Michele, ed. 1956. “Il tetto”. Dal Soggetto al Film. Bologna: Cappelli. Kezich, Tullio. 1999. Scene da un matrimonio. In I bambini ci guardano di Vittorio De Sica: testimonianze, interventi, sceneggiatura, ed. Gualtiero De Santi and Manuel De Sica. Rome: Editoriale Pantheon. Melani, Pier Luigi. 1945. I bambini ci guardano. Giornale del Mattino, January 28. O[jetti], P[aola]. 1942. Cesare Giulio Viola parla del suo nuovo film “Pricò.” Film 5, 30: 7. Pandolfi, Vito, ed. 1956. Il teatro italiano del dopoguerra. Parma: Guanda. Pietrangeli, Antonio. 1945. “I bambini ci guardano.” Star 2, 5: 3. Radice, Raul. 1944. “I bambini ci guardano”. Corriere della Sera, November 24. Raffaelli, Sergio. 1993. Un “Lei” politico, cronaca del bando fascista (gennaio-aprile 1938). Omaggio a Gianfranco Folena, vol. 3, 2061— 2073. Padua: Editoriale Programma. —. 1992. La lingua filmata. Florence: Le Lettere. —. 1983. Il dialetto del cinema in Italia (1896-1983). Rivista Italiana di dialettologia 7: 13—97. Ripandelli, Lidia C. 1942. Di De Sica e della Poesia. Primi Piani. 2, 4: 35. Ruffin, Valentina and Patrizia D’Agostino. 1997. Dialoghi di regime. Rome: Bulzoni. Scorrano, Luigi. 1996. Il polso del presente. Poesia, narrativa e teatro di Cesare Giulio Viola. Modena: Mucchi Editore.

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Salvatorelli Luigi and Giovanni Mira. 1970. Storia d’Italia nel periodo fascista. Vol. 2. Milan: Mondadori. Viola, Cesare Giulio. 1943. Pricò: I bambini ci guardano. Milan: Mondadori. —. 1909. L’altro volto che ride. Naples: Ricciardi. —. 1914. L’occhio del fanciullo. Episodi tratti dalle memorie della fanciullezza. Milan: Treves. Zavattini, Cesare. 1979. Zavattini. In L’avventurosa storia del cinema italiano: raccontata dai suoi protagonisti, 1935-1959, ed. Franca Faldini and Goffredo Fofi, 56—57. Milan: Feltrinelli.

DECLARES PEREIRA: A WITNESS IN SEARCH OF AN IDENTITY ELENA BENELLI, UNIVERSITÉ DE MONTREAL

Pereira, the reporter of the culture section of the newspaper, Lisboa, emerges from Tabucchi’s pen as a pensive, anxious man in a precarious state of health, and he is defined as such from the first page of the novel: “lui era grasso, soffriva di cuore e aveva la pressione alta e il medico gli aveva detto che se andava avanti così non gli restava più tanto tempo, ma il fatto è che Pereira si mise a pensare alla morte, sostiene” (Tabucchi 1994, 7) [he was fat and suffered from heart trouble and high bloodpressure, and the doctor had told him that if he went on like this he wouldn’t last long. But the fact is that Pereira began dwelling on death, he declares] (Tabucchi 1995, 1). A very similar description of the protagonist is presented by the narrator of Roberto Faenza’s film (Faenza and Vecchio 1995, 21),1 the only difference being that in the film, Pereira is heading to Father Antonio’s sacristy, where he is accustomed to making his confessions and venting his emotions, while in the novel he is in his office, at work editing the cultural pages of the newspaper. In both situations, on a sunny morning on the 25th July 1938, the protagonist begins a heuristic journey into his own identity, through which he will question both his own existence and his role as an intellectual. Indeed, throughout the course of both book and film, Pereira maintains a certain detachment and distance from reality, cultivating a feeling of powerlessness that was relatively widespread among Portuguese intellectuals. He plays the part so well that, even though he is a journalist by profession, he must seek information for his news stories from Father Antonio and Manuel, the waiter at the Café Orquidea. He concerns himself only with literature, as he tells Marta when he meets her for the first time: “io mi occupo solo della pagine culturale” (Tabucchi 1994, 28) [I am only responsible for the culture page] (Tabucchi 1995, 16). Similarly, he justifies himself to Mrs. Delgado, when she reproaches him for not using his status as a public figure to do more to 1

The film first appeared in theatres in 1995.

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oppose the menace of the Salazar regime, by saying: “io non sono Thomas Mann, sono solo un oscuro direttore della pagina culturale di un modesto giornale del pomeriggio” (Tabucchi 1994, 73) [I’m not Thomas Mann, I’m only the obscure editor of the culture page of a second-rate evening paper] (Tabucchi 1995, 46). For a significant part of the film and the novel, the protagonist assumes an attitude of resignation and, before he is capable of revealing a new, yet constantly re-negotiated side of his identity, Pereira must gradually come to terms with reality, as well as the role of the intellectual, through his encounters with other characters, thus constituting the salient moments in the creation of his identity. It is clear that Faenza’s film follows the formal progression of the novel from the outset: the refrain “declares Pereira” that punctuates both, is intermittent and becomes the leitmotif of the narration. The narrative strategies differ completely, however, since the reader of the novel cannot attribute the narrator’s statements to a particular character, while in the film the director purposefully chooses a specific character as narrator, thus placing the work, as a whole, in perspective. Before outlining the fundamental differences between the narrative strategies in these two works, it is necessary to consider the complex problem of identity construction, since this concept occupies a privileged space in the creation of the main character. Indeed, Pereira is in search of his own identity and role in society: his constant preoccupation with the theme of death that pervades the first part of the story, together with a vision of culture as a phenomenon frozen in the past and almost devoid of links to the present, are slowly replaced by a more dynamic vision of life, implying a certain faith in the future and the possibility of a different existence. The protagonist’s identity undergoes a gradual modification and can be analyzed as a case in progress. In the novel, Pereira recounts various moments of his personal experience, and the ensuing elaboration of these biographical details necessarily encompasses the process of narrativisation inherent in this expression, since every identity, as Francesco Remotti observes: “viene sempre, in qualche modo, ‘costruita’ o ‘inventata...’” [is always, in some way ‘constructed’ or ‘invented’] (Remotti 1996, 5).2 This process of presenting one’s individual life is evidenced, initially, by the narrative principle that underlies the entire organisation of the story: in the refrain “sostiene Pereira,” the narrativisation of Pereira’s personal micro-history is confronted with the larger narration of official history, and the actions of the oppressive regime —a theme that is developed throughout the novel. Pereira creates his own 2

Translation are mine, unless otherwise stated.

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fiction in his life: from his initial presumption that he is unable to do much for his country which is on the brink of political upheaval, and his search for redemption through literature as a parallel world, where he can escape the horrors of the contemporary, he embraces an engagée style when he composes and publishes Monteiro Rossi’s obituary, in which he openly denounces the regime’s atrocities. In the fictional construction of the character Pereira, just as Remotti noted with regard to identity construction, we observe a conflict throughout the account between “due operazioni diametralmente opposte che tuttavia si richiamano l’un l’altra: a) un’operazione di separazione; b) un’operazione di assimilazione” [two diametrically opposed operations, which nevertheless recall each other: a) an operation of separation; b) an operation of assimilation] (Remotti 1996, 7). For a significant part of the narrative, the protagonist attempts to distinguish himself from the two young people who follow emotional cues which only evoke regrets for him, as he spends his time talking to the portrait of his dead wife.3 Only at a later point, when he is capable of assimilating and embracing the same motivations that inspire the young people, will he be able to permanently change his fate. In his work, Remotti identifies the dynamics of identity, particularly “se l’identità è costruita, se l’identità è una ‘finzione’, si impone la necessità di cogliere una logica di come è costruita...” [if identity is constructed, if identity is a ‘fiction’, if it demands a reconstruction of the means through which it was constructed] (Remotti 1996, 65). Borrowing the idea that identity must first come to terms with discursive construction from Remotti, then at an intermediary level of “connessioni, caratterizzato da potenzialità, ovvero da elementi alternativi, a cui si aggiunge la dimensione del flusso e del mutamento continuo, oscuro e magmatico, radicalmente de-struttivo” [connections characterised by potential or alternative realities, with the last category consisting of the dimension of flow and continual change that is obscure and chaotic, radically destructive](Remotti 1996, 9), it becomes possible to chart the development of the character’s identity, as he passes through these three phases: discursive construction, comparison with alternative realities, at the end of both the film and the novel, in order to participate in the cathartic flow that will irrevocably alter the identity. The psychological evolution of the character proceeds more rapidly in the film than in the novel. In the film the key moments which produce change are: the meeting with Monteiro and Marta; the brief conversation 3

Whose smile, in the final frame, indicates approval of Pereira’s choice.

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with a Portuguese-German woman on the train travelling to the thermal baths;4 the discussions with Dr. Cardoso about literature and the theories of the dominant ego; the last exchange with Marta at the cinema; and ultimately, the assassination of the young man and Pereira’s consequent rebellion. In the novel, the alterations in Pereira’s state-of-mind take place more slowly over the course of multiple meetings with other characters throughout the text, together with frequent digressions. Although the novel and the film, overall, do have points of contact, it is still necessary to point out some of the divergences. In the film, as Millicent Marcus observes, the encounter with Marta at the cinema, which is completely missing from the novel, has the greatest impact on the spectator and Pereira alike: by embedding within Pereira Declares a pro-Salazarist documentary that inverts the ideological thrust of the outer story, Faenza not only parodies the manipulative techniques of propaganda, but also tacitly admits the mechanisms of persuasion that structure his own cinematic enterprise. Most obvious is the shared technique of the voice-over narration that takes to authoritarian extremes, in A Revoluçao, the more subtle uses to which it is put in Pereira Declares (Marcus 2002, 104).

For Pereira, the film-within-a-film brings into clearer perspective the reality of the times, and he momentarily assumes the perspective of a viewer. The fact that the documentary’s narrative voice describes an idyllic Portugal powerfully contrasts with Marta’s final comment: “tutto quello che ha visto è falso! Ma la gente non lo sa. Bisogna che lo sappia. Abbiamo bisogno di persone come lei per far sapere a tutti la verità” [everything you have seen is false! But others don’t know this. They must know. We need people like you to show everyone the truth] (Faenza and Vecchio 1995, 94). When Pereira turns around to look at her, it is already too late, the girl has disappeared and he will never see her again. This scene possesses a strong heuristic significance because, at the end of the film, Pereira denounces the regime and its abuses, just as Marta had wished, having witnessed and suffered them himself. In the novel, however, the last meeting between Pereira and Marta lacks such significance: the two arrange to meet at the Café Orquidea, where the protagonist invites her to dinner, and what little conversation is 4

In the film Pereira meets Mrs. Delgado on the outbound trip to the thermal baths while, in the book, this meeting occurs on the way back from his visit to the baths and his friend Silva. The episode in the novel is thus constructed to better emphasize the absurdity of the lives of the newspaper editor and his university friend, which are entirely detached from reality and the capital city.

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exchanged, is mostly related to Monteiro, for whom Pereira feels a fatherly affection, and his need of money. In the book, Marta imagines and anticipates Pereira’s fate. Indeed, she tells him, over the telephone, that she has dyed her hair and physically transformed herself and, sitting at the table, also adds: “ho deciso di modificare la mia fisionomia, rispose Marta, in certe circostanze è necessario e per me si era reso necessario diventare un’altra persona” (Tabucchi 1994, 138) [I decided to change my appearance, replied Marta, in certain circumstances it’s necessary and, in my case, it became essential to make myself a different person] (Tabucchi 1995, 87). The girl’s transformation is more marked in the book than in Nicoletta Braschi’s film version. In the book the physical alteration of the person who dyes her hair, starts wearing glasses and adopts a French name, Lise Delaunay, is described in greater detail. She also becomes extremely thin, making it hard for Pereira to recognise her. Pereira will also have to modify his appearance at the end of the film (though the physical and psychological transformation begins before his meeting with Marta, specifically at the moment when he leaves Dr. Cardoso’s clinic): he shaves off his moustache to resemble the photograph in the fake passport and leaves Lisbon. In the novel, he simply chooses a new identity which emphasizes psychological over physical changes5, since he has assumed a French name: “era un bel passaporto francese, fatto molto bene, la fotografia era quella di un uomo grasso con le borse sotto gli occhi e l’età corrispondeva. Si chiamava Baudin, François Baudin. Gli parve un bel nome, a Pereira. Lo cacciò in valigia e prese il ritratto di sua moglie” (Tabucchi 1994, 206) [it was a French passport, a good piece of work, the photograph was of a fat man with bags under his eyes and the age was about right. His name was Baudin, François Baudin. It sounded a pretty good name to Pereira. He slipped the passport into the suitcase and picked up the picture of his wife] (Tabucchi 1995, 136).6 While there are the same key moments in novel and film that slowly lead to Pereira’s maturation, there is one episode that does not appear in the film, yet perhaps represents his first step towards an alternative notion of self. He decides to head to the British Bar on the Cais de Sodré to have lunch: “sapeva che quello era un luogo frequentato da letterati e sperava di incontrarne qualcuno. Entrò e si mise in un tavolo d’angolo. Al tavolo vicino, infatti, c’era il romanziere Aquilino Ribeiro che pranzava con Bernardo Marques, il disegnatore d’avanguardia” (Tabucchi 1994, 103— 5

In the novel, Pereira’s moustache is not mentioned. Throughout the novel, France provides the foil for the example of civil resistance to dictatorship, both in the story that Pereira decides to translate, and in Dr. Cardoso’s choice to emigrate.

6

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104) [He knew it was a place frequented by writers and he hoped to run across someone. In he went and sat down at a corner table. And sure enough, there, at the next table was Aquilino Ribeiro, the novelist, lunching with Bernardo Marques, the avant-garde artist] (Tabucchi 1995, 63—64).7 Pereira greets both of them before sitting down, but cannot help overhearing the conversation between the two artists: Capì che Bernardo Marques non voleva più disegnare e che il romanziere voleva partire per l’estero. Questo gli dette un senso di scoraggiamento, sostiene Pereira, perché non si aspettava che uno scrittore come quello abbandonasse il suo paese. […] Pereira finì le sue chioccioline e la sua limonata, si alzò e si soffermò davanti al tavolo dei due artisti. Auguro a lorsignori una buona continuazione, disse, permettano che mi presenti, sono il dottor Pereira, della pagina culturale del Lisboa, tutto il Portogallo è fiero di avere due artisti come voi, di voi abbiamo bisogno. Poi uscì nella luce abbagliante del meriggio e si diresse al treno (Tabucchi 1994, 104). He gathered that Bernardo Marques intended to give up his art work and that the novelist had decided to go and live abroad. Pereira found this disheartening, he declares, because he wouldn’t have expected a writer of that stamp to go and leave his country in the lurch. […] Pereira finished his winkles and lemonade, got to his feet and paused a moment by the table where the two artists sat. Gentlemen, don’t let me interrupt your meal, he said, allow me to introduce myself however, I am Dr Pereira of the culture page of the Lisboa, the whole of Portugal is proud to have two such artists as you, we have sore need of you (Tabucchi 1995, 64).

This encounter disturbs him because he sees that two important Portuguese artists, who, like him, are troubled by the regime, believe that emigrating is the only possible solution to escape the political climate. Nevertheless, faced with this event, Pereira acts independently for the first time. His words may seem to express his agreement with the two artists, but in fact, serve to contest their decision, as if he had already intuited that intellectuals can intervene in order to change reality. The visit to Dr. Cardoso’s clinic is another decisive moment in Pereira’s evolution, to the same degree in both film and novel. Here Pereira learns about the theory of the dominant ego and the confederation of souls from Dr. Cardoso, who explains: quella che viene chiamata la norma, o il nostro essere, o la normalità, è solo un risultato, non una premessa, e dipende dal controllo di un io 7

These are real-life/actually Portugese artists.

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egemone che si è imposto nella confederazione delle anime; nel caso che sorga un altro io, più forte e più potente, codesto io spodesta l’io egemone e ne prende il posto, passando a dirigere la coorte delle anime, meglio la confederazione, e la preminenza si mantiene fino a quando non viene spodestato a sua volta da un altro io egemone, per un attacco diretto o per una paziente erosione. Forse, concluse il dottor Cardoso, dopo una paziente erosione c’è un io egemone che sta prendendo la testa della confederazione delle sue anime, dottor Pereira, e lei non può farci nulla, può solo eventualmente assecondarlo (Tabucchi 1994, 123). What we think of as ourselves, our inward being, is only an effect, not a cause, and what’s more it is subject to the control of a ruling ego which has imposed its will on the confederation of our souls, so in the case of another ego arising, one stronger and more powerful, this ego overthrows the first ruling ego, takes its place and acquires the chieftainship of the cohort of souls, or rather the confederation, and remains in power until it is in turn overthrown by yet another ruling ego, either by frontal attack or by slow nibbling away. It may be, concluded Dr Cardoso, that after slowly nibbling away in you some ruling ego is gaining the chieftainship of your confederation of souls, Dr Pereira, and there’s nothing you can do about it except perhaps give it a helping hand whenever you get the chance (Tabucchi 1995, 77).

Dr. Cardoso’s theory encourages Pereira to develop an awareness of the change that is taking place within him. The ruling ego is thus an element of Pereira’s personality attempting to emerge after contacts with alternative realities and other characters, and in order to assert itself, requires a (traumatic) event to provoke a destructive change. This final event which definitively affects Pereira and incites his dominant ego into action is the assassination of Monteiro Rossi by the Salazarist police, which he witnesses as a survivor. We recall that the word “survivor” is closely related to the word “witness”. According to Émile Benveniste, the superstes is the one who manages “to have come through any event whatsoever and to exist beyond this event’, that is to have been a ‘witness’ of it. Or again, it can mean ‘he who stands (stat) over the thing, who is present at it” (Benveniste 1973, 526). In both the novel and the film, Pereira acts as a witness, since he personally observed events that he recounts through the narrative voice in both book and film. From Tabucchi’s text, we move to Faenza’s film which, as Millicent Marcus has accurately observed, relies on a single narrative voice, that of Dr. Cardoso: A dominant ego must preside over the confederation of souls just as a unified narrative perspective must govern the representation of Pereira’s

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Declares Pereira: A Witness in Search of an Identity story. By identifying that dominant ego with Cardoso, Faenza is choosing to ally his own authorial stance with the progressive, culturally enlightened cosmopolitanism of the doctor appointed to care, metaphorically, for the health of the national body politic (Marcus 2002, 103).

In choosing this type of representation, Faenza alters the structure of the book, since attributing the narrative voice to a character that is internal to the story implies changing its final meaning, and thus making a decision that destabilizes the narration, which comprises the principal structural feature of the novel. Working along these lines, the director modifies the perspective of the work, anchoring it in a subjective viewpoint, while the writer achieves a process of deconstruction of the narrative’s fixed logic, to privilege a more ambiguous rationale. The narrative technique in the novel is call into question from the outset, since it is impossible to know who speaks as the narrator: “sostiene Pereira di averlo conosciuto in un giorno d’estate. Una magnifica giornata d’estate, soleggiata e ventilata, e Lisbona sfavillava. Pare che Pereira stesse in redazione” (Tabucchi 1994, 7) [Pereira declares he met him one summer’s day. A fine fresh sunny summer’s day and Lisbon was sparkling] (Tabucchi 1995, 1). The reader is presented with a character whose life and actions, during a particular moment of Portugal’s history— the summer of 1938—are recounted by an unknown person. This detail is noteworthy because an author’s narrative choices influence the accessibility as well as the interpretation of the text, independently of its reception. Beyond this, the selection of the narrative viewpoint and voice, in the words of Gérard Genette, refer to: cette capacité, et les modalités de son exercice, que vise notre catégorie du mode narratif : la « représentation », ou plus exactement l’information narrative a ses degrés ; le récit peut fournir au lecteur plus ou moins de détails, et de façon plus ou moins directe, et sembler ainsi se tenir à plus ou moins grande distance de ce qu’il raconte (Genette 1972, 183). this capacity, and the modalities of its use, which our category of narrative mode addresses : the ‘representation’, or more precisely the narrative information has its levels: the story can provide the reader with more or less detail and in a more or less direct manner, and in this way it seems to hold itself at a greater or lesser distance from the subject of the story.

Furthermore, perspective is added to distance, or “[selon] les capacités de connaissance de telle ou telle partie prenante de l’histoire (personnage ou groupe des personnages), dont il adoptera ou feindra d’adopter ce que l’on nomme couramment la ‘vision’ ou le ‘ point de vue ‘, semblant alors

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prendre à l’égard de histoire telle ou telle perspective’” [according to the capacities of knowledge of a certain recipient of the story (individual or a group of people) from which he/she will adopt, or pretend to adopt, what is currently referred to as the ‘vision’ or ‘point of view’, seeming thus to take into historical consideration one perspective or the other] (Genette 1972, 184). Pereira’s story is related by a narrative voice that reveals, in the third-person, the journalist’s life as well as the his intimate thoughts which are interspersed with passages, in which conversations between characters are reported without the aid of quotation marks or the visual separation of the dialogue in the text. For example, when Pereira meets Mrs. Delgado aboard the train leaving Lisbon, he expresses himself in the following manner: “ho notato che stava leggendo un romanzo di Thomas Mann, disse Pereira, è uno scrittore che amo molto. Anche lui non è felice per quello che sta accadendo in Germania, disse la signora Delgado, non direi che sia felice. Anch’io forse non sono felice per quello che sta accadendo in Portogallo, ammise Pereira” (Tabucchi 1994, 72) [I noticed you were reading a book by Thomas Mann, said Pereira, he’s a writer I very much admire. He too is not happy about what’s going on in Germany, said Senhora Delgado, I don’t think he’s happy about it at all. Maybe I’m not happy about what’s going on in Portugal, admitted Pereira] (Tabucchi 1995, 45). The characters´ statements proceed with no clear typographical indication of direct speech, apart from the insertion of a short phrase between commas with a declarative verb. Consequently this effect results in the alienation of the reader, who is aware of the author’s narrative strategy: the subject of the verb varies and moves from the third to the first-person, an unambiguous signal of direct speech, partly on account of the declarative verbs which remain in the third-person. Tabucchi overlaps the narrative levels of his novel, thus creating different levels of enunciation which we can summarise in this way: Pereira sostiene che uscì turbato da questo breve colloquio (Tabucchi 1994, 15). Pereira declares [level 1] that he was upset by this brief exchange [level 2] (Tabucchi 1995, 7)

Only the verb ‘to declare’ indicates a statement that is affirmed with conviction, and it is referred to us by the narrator. But who communicates Pereira’s thoughts? Who is the intermediary who conveys the protagonist’s actions? The answer can only be a hypothesis. On this subject, Tabucchi has asserted:

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Declares Pereira: A Witness in Search of an Identity Quando è arrivato il momento di scrivere io gli ho detto: “senti Pereira, adesso sarà bene che tu assuma le tue responsabilità perché io sono un uomo del 1993, sto scrivendo una storia nel 1993, non posso assumermi la responsabilità di una vicenda che è stata vissuta da un uomo nel 1938. […] Pereira ha deciso di esprimersi in questo modo, di assumersi le sue responsabilità, di essere lui che sosteneva. La parola sostiene in italiano, è vero, rimanda in qualche modo a un verbale di polizia, ma non soltanto, rimanda a una testimonianza, non so. […] Attraverso questo stratagemma ho preso le distanze da Pereira e ho lasciato che la storia la raccontasse lui, fosse lui veramente a descrivercela, con il suo punto di vista e con la sua responsabilità, anche se io ero il mezzo attraverso il quale lui si esprimeva” (Tabucchi 1998, 188). When I reached the moment of writing, I said to him: “Listen, Pereira, now you should accept certain responsibilities because I live in 1993, I’m writing a story in 1993, and I can’t take on the responsibility of an event that someone lived through in 1938 […] Pereira decided to express himself in this way, to accept his responsibilities, to be the one to declare. It’s true that the word ‘declares’ in Italian recalls a police report, but not only this, it also recalls a testimony, I don’t know. […] Through this trick I distanced myself from Pereira and let him tell the story, so that he was really the person reporting it to us, with his point of view and his responsibility, even though I was the medium through which he expressed himself.”

Accepting the author’s reasoning, we can conclude that it is Tabucchi, in the guise of the fictional author, who relates the story that Pereira (through a dream or an invented tale) had previously told him. Some theoretical considerations from Calvino’s essay, “Levels of Reality in Literature” (Calvino 1986), in which he clearly illustrates the progression of various narrative levels in fiction, can assist in parsing the narrative structure. According to Calvino’s analysis, paraphrased here, the following levels can be identified: Tabucchi (indicated here as the fictional author) writes that Pereira declares that in Lisbon in 1938 it happened that…. However this is purely hypothetical, given that “Tabucchi writes” does not appear anywhere in the text. The hypothesis has specific implications, because it serves to multiply the narrative levels, making them transitory, thus forcing the reader to interact with an ephemeral narrator. In contrast, the film anchors the narrator in the character of Dr. Cardoso, thus physically identifying the narrator through an individual voice: that of Daniel Auteil. This strategy would allow the viewer to assume that Dr. Cardoso is telling the story to Pereira a posteriori, most likely in France after both have fled Portugal. In this way, the viewer’s epistemological assumptions are supported, and the film is brought to a happy ending: after having submitted Monteiro’s obituary, Pereira leaves

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Lisbon. The conclusion of the novel is very different and much more uncertain, as seen in the simple, but much less optimistic, final sentence: “Era meglio affrettarsi, il Lisboa sarebbe uscito fra poco e non c’era tempo da perdere...” (Tabucchi 1994, 207) [Better be getting along, the Lisboa would be out any moment and there was no time to lose…] (Tabucchi 1995, 136). In this ending both the fate and the ultimate destination of the protagonist are left in suspense, while the reader is unable to infer any positive outcome, and can only presume his freedom. Marcus argues that: “Tabucchi fore-grounds the problem in very title of the novel, Sostiene Pereira: una testimonianza, which privileges the protagonist’s act of recounting, and elevates the telling to the level of historic witness…” (Marcus 2002, 99). By underscoring the interaction between the character and the fictional author, Marcus emphasises the function of bearing witness, as a private communication, to an individual who guarantees that the information will be made public and, therefore, historically verifiable: we are constantly reminded that Pereira is in the presence of the writer as he writes and that the speaker’s presence is guarantee of the truth of the events to which he bears witness. The process of testifying—of assertion by Pereira, of reception and transcription by the listener—is privileged throughout this text in a way that tells us from the start, that the protagonist survived, that he feels compelled to speak, and that he has found his interlocutor, the “addressable other” who will give public form to a private chronicle. […] With every repetition of the declarative phrase Tabucchi retraces and re-enacts the inspirational process that the historical prototype of Pereira made possible, and that in turn brought him to life in the pages of the text. What is fore-grounded, then, in Tabucchi’s prose, studded with the words sostiene Pereira, is a two-tiered process by which history encounters the literary imagination, which in turn produces the text of witness (Marcus 2002, 100).

Although Marcus is right to focus on the relationship between the character who speaks and the writer who records his story, her analysis omits an important protagonist in the process of bearing witness: the witness is not the writer who has listened to the protagonist’s account of the facts, but rather the reader who receives the testimony. Identifying the writer as the recipient of the testimony excludes, from this ternary process of bearing witness, the most important agent: the reader. An analysis of the word ‘witness’, according to Benveniste, reveals that: “etymologically testis means the one who attends as the ‘third’ person (*ter-stis) an affair in which two persons are interested” (Benveniste 1973, 526). Bearing witness implies a ternary, rather than a binary, process which also involves

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the reader as the only person who can be a witness of the protagonist’s speech, which is re-read by the transcriber. In this way, by filtering the narrative through multiple levels, Tabucchi transforms it into a testimony of private and historical facts, not only because Pereira, having survived these events, communicates them to the author, but because in so doing, he addresses the reader. The author thus overcomes fictional barriers and asks, just as Eco does, for the reader’s interpretative co-operation. If the narration were entirely in the third-person, the reader would be confronted with an omniscient narrator who would not require such cooperation. On the other hand, if the narration were entirely in the first-person, (i.e. if Pereira were to directly address the reader), then the narrative would be limited to the protagonist’s viewpoint regarding the events, and the appropriate detachment to make these events historically interesting. The confirmation of Pereira’s account is enacted solely by the reader as the witness, the third element who indirectly participates in the protagonist’s life which is arbitrated by the writer. Given this perspective, it becomes clear that, in the case of the film, where the narrative voice is stable and identifiable, the viewer is implicated in a different sense and the testimony is directly transferred to Cardoso who, in turn, decides to recount it to the public, in an attempt to involve others. In the final sentence, spoken offcamera, he addresses the public: Sostiene Pereira che, mentre si allontanava dalla folla, aveva la sensazione che la sua età non gli pesasse più, come se fosse tornato un ragazzo agile e svelto, con una gran voglia di vivere. E allora ripensò alla sua spiaggia della Granja e a una fragile ragazza che gli avrebbe dato i migliori anni della sua vita. E, per ricordare tutto ciò, ebbe voglia di fare un sogno. Un sogno bellissimo, a occhi aperti. Ma di questo sogno non vuole parlare Pereira, perché lo avrebbe raccontato di persona a colui che vi ha narrato questa storia (Faenza and Vecchio 1995, 134). [my emphasis] While he was moving away from the crowd, declares Pereira, he had the sensation that age was no longer weighing him down, as if he were, once again, a quick and agile boy/youth with a great appetite for life. Then he remembered his beach at Granja and the fragile girl who would have given him the best years of her life. And, so as to remember all of this, he wished for a dream. An enchanting day-dream. But Pereira does not want to talk about this dream, because he’ll tell it to the person who is passing this story on to you.

Both the protagonist of the novel and the film, submit to the process of re-defining their identity which, through numerous encounters and doubts, involves a destructive movement that radically deconstructs their original

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identity, before completely transforming it and reconstructing it on new foundations. This metamorphosis is only tangentially integrated into both works: Pereira decides to act in defiance of the regime only after Monteiro’s death. In that gesture of insubordination and quiet rage, the protagonist’s moment of catharsis is manifested, as he embraces action over procrastination. Remotti observes that in this catharsis, “come c’è una purificazione del corpo, così esiste una ‘purificazione dell’anima’, una ‘purificazione relativa al pensiero’. Anche qui si tratta di ‘separare’ non già il simile dal simile, ma il peggiore dal migliore, ‘buttando via’ la parte cattiva e trattenendo la parte buona” [just as there is a purification of the body, there also exists a “purification of the soul.” Here, too, it becomes necessary to “separate,” not like from like, but the worse from the better, ‘disposing of’ the bad parts and keeping the good] (Remotti 1996, 24). Pereira faces these dichotomies throughout his journey: he experiences a corporeal purification in Dr. Cardoso’s clinic and achieves a spiritual purification that finally creates space for his dominant ego, after his own identity is destroyed. He passes through these phases, described by Remotti, to emerge firmly grounded in the contemporary world and its rhythm. In this way, “l’uscita dalla logica dell’identità consiste in una sorta di elogio della precarietà, che è poi la ‘libertà’ a cui si è ricondotti o condannati tutte le volte che si depongono, sia pure per un istante, maschere e finzioni” [the exit from the constraints of identity consists of an appreciation of precariousness, which is in fact the ‘freedom’ to which we return and are condemned each time we let down, even for an instant, our masks and fictions] (Remotti 1996, 24). Pereira’s evolution causes us to re-think the construction of identity as a vertical, historical space that is stable and permanently defined, in favour of a space that compels the contemporary subject to distance and re-configure himself in a slippery environment, where the footholds of Western rationale and imposed ideology offer no assistance. As Iain Chambers has explained: in the shift of language into a post-humanist landscape where no single subject, history, or culture is able to authorize narration, interpretation, there occurs a marked displacement from questions of property, origin, and identity to diversified and heterogeneous ways of being in the world. In this shift from the unilateral optics of representation (invariably concentrated in the subject-centred pragmatics of realism) to the less guaranteed reception of poetic disturbance and revelation, there in the sounds, signals, and silence of language lie the graphic traces of a potential, of a politics, that exceeds instrumental rationality and institutional arrest (Chambers 2002, 28).

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For these reasons, we conclude that the novel presents a more accurate creation of this landscape, where certainties are shattered and the narrative, after a long heuristic trajectory, abandons the reader on the threshold of the protagonist’s new freedom/identity. Through the multiplication of narrative levels, Tabucchi succeeds in displacing the authority of the narrative voice, thereby de-centering the subject’s position in the world. Conversely, in the film version, Faenza imposes, on the protagonist, a restriction of this new-found freedom by attaching it to the somewhat paternalistic Dr. Cardoso, thus denying this freedom any performative instability. It is in this divergence between the endings of the novel and the film, the former open and the latter guided by the director/protagonist’s point of view, that the different epistemological connotations of the two works can be understood. Through highlighting the complex process of the construction of the protagonist’s identity, up to the point where he is poised to become someone else, Tabucchi enacts a deconstruction of the subject’s epistemological certainties without necessarily providing an alternative. The protagonist is, nevertheless, incorporated into the rhythm of the contemporary world. In contrast, Faenza offers the viewer a more optimistic vision, freely interpreting the end of the novel and thus creating a long and generous transposition of literary works that leads to his most recent film, I vicerè.8 This work is a portrait of Italy of the Enlightenment which, as with Pereira, transports the action to a different historical period (and a different geographical place in the case of Tabucchi’s novel) to address the events of modern-day Italy.9 In both instances, the authors attempt to interpret contemporary reality by filtering it through diverse narrative choices, conscious of the fact that, as Calvino observed in “Levels of Reality in Literature”: i livelli di realtà che la scrittura suscita, la successione di veli e di schermi forse si allontana all’infinito, forse s’affaccia sul nulla. Come abbiamo visto svanire l’io, il primo soggetto dello scrivere, così ce ne sfugge l’ultimo oggetto. Forse è nel campo di tensione che si stabilisce tra un vuoto e un vuoto che la letteratura moltiplica gli spessori di una realtà inesauribile di forme e di significati (Calvino 1980, 390). the levels of reality evoked by literature, the whole gamut of veils and shields—may perhaps stray off into infinity, may perhaps encounter nothingness. As we have witnessed the disappearance of the “I,” the primary subject of the verb “to write,” so the ultimate object eludes us. 8

First in theatres in 2007. See Millicent Marcus’ article (previously cited) for discussion of the transference of an Italian reality into Portuguese life.

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Perhaps it is in the field of tension between one vacuum and another that literature multiplies the depths of a reality that is inexhaustible in forms and meanings (Calvino 1986, 120).

Translated by Meriel Tulante

Works Cited Benveniste, Emile. 1973. Indo-European Language and Society. Trans. Elizabeth Palmer. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press. Calvino, Italo. 1986. Levels of Reality in Literature. In The Uses of Literature by Italo Calvino. Trans. Patrick Creagh. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. —. 1980. I livelli della realtà della letteratura. In Una pietra sopra by Italo Calvino, 374—390. Milan: Mondadori. Chambers, Iain. 2002. Citizenship, Language and Modernity. PMLA 117, 1: 24—31. Faenza, Roberto and Sergio Vecchio. 1995. Sostiene Pereira. Filmbook. Milan: Il Castoro. Genette, Gérard. 1972. Figures III. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Marcus, Millicent. 2002. After Fellini. National Cinema in the Postmodern Age. Baltimore-London: John Hopkins University Press. Remotti, Francesco. 1996. Contro L’identità. Bari-Rome: Laterza. Tabucchi, Antonio. 1998. Come Nasce Una Storia. In Scrittori a Confronto, ed. Anna Dolfi and Maria Carla Papini, 181—201. Rome: Bulzoni. —. 1995. Declares Pereira. Trans. Patrick Creagh. London: Harvill. —. 1994. Sostiene Pereira. Milan: Feltrinelli.

SECTION 5: BLURRED BOUNDARIES

THE AMPHIBOLIC NATURE OF PASOLINI’S THEOREM(S) LUCA CAMINATI, COLGATE UNIVERSITY

After the relentless investigation of such fundamental dualities as the relationship between Self and Other, West and East, and Sophocles and Freud in his Oedipus Rex (1968), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s next film dealt with what he abhorred most: the Italian bourgeoisie, or “the most ignorant bourgeoisie of all Europe” [la borghesia più ignorante d’Europa] (Pasolini 2001, 336)1 as Orson Welles, playing the director in “La ricotta”, famously quips. The germ from which Teorema developed was a theater piece intended as the seventh play of a series of theatrical experiments begun in 1965 with Orgia, and conceived by Pasolini as an attempt to revitalize what he saw as a stale Italian theatrical scene. These experiments fell under the general heading of “Theater of the Word”.2 This is how Pasolini describes the theatrical genesis of Teorema: La storia dell'idea di Teorema è molto curiosa e significativa. Circa tre anni fa ho cominciato a scrivere, per la prima volta in vita mia, delle cose di teatro; ho scritto quasi contemporaneamente sei tragedie in versi e Teorema era, come prima idea, una tragedia in versi, la settima. Poi ho sentito che l’amore tra questo visitatore divino e questi personaggi borghesi era molto più bello se silenzioso (Pasolini 2001, 2934). The story concerning Teorema is quite curious and significant. About three years ago, for the first time in my life, I started writing some stuff for the theater. I wrote almost six tragedies, in verse, at the same time, and Teorema was first conceived as the seventh tragedy. Then I felt that the love between this divine visitor and these bourgeois characters was going to be more beautiful if silent.

Three years later Pasolini began working on two different permutations of the story of divine/devilish visitation in two different media, a book and a 1

All translation are mine, unless stated otherwise. On Pasolini’s theater see Watson 1989. I would like to thank Masha Salazkina and Roger Gathman for their invaluable contributions to this essay.

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film, the latter of which still puzzles, annoys or exalts filmgoers today. The first question for the critic is whether Teorema is first a film or a book. Pasolini himself disclaimed any possible hierarchy when he declared: “Teorema-libro è nato, come su fondo oro, dipinto con la mano destra, mentre con la mano sinistra lavoravo ad affrescare una grande parete (il film omonimo). In tale natura anfibologica, non so sinceramente dire quale sia prevalente: se quella letteraria o quella filmica” [The Theorem-book was born, as on a gold background, painted by my right hand, while my left hand was working on frescoing a large wall (the film with the same title). Under such amphibolic circumstances, I can’t tell whether the literary or the filmic version prevailed] (Naldini 1989, 317). The amphibolic nature, i.e. the constitutive ontological ambiguity of the project will be the starting point for my analysis of these two Theorem(s), in which I will offer a reading of the significant moments of both texts. My argument is that both Teoremas challenge their own artistic status. The Teorema-film is involved in a dialogue with the literary on the one hand, and the painterly tradition on the other. It is in fact filled with both literal and allusive pictorial quotations (from medieval hagiography to Francis Bacon). Therefore, the pictorial metaphor employed by Pasolini becomes more than a mere description of the genesis of both film and book. Instead, it offers viewers a hermeneutic access to a key sequence in the film: Pietro’s “action painting”—his urinating on the canvas. This exposes Pasolini’s “heretical” relationship to the international avantgardes as well as to the process of artistic creation. In a similar iconoclastic vein, the Teorema-book is a direct attack on the notion of traditional mimesis. Mixing different narrative techniques, including the contemporary French movement of the nouveau roman, Pasolini creates a pastiche of styles that takes as its target the XIX century tradition of the realist novel. To sum up, Pasolini’s project rethinks both realism and modernism because these prevalent modern aesthetic regimes failed to provide an effective response to the social and political changes of his time. His abiura [repudiation] reflects his belief that both modes of representation collaborate in the culture of “the society of spectacle” as part of the “anthropological mutation” of Italy in the era of the post-war economic boom.

Épater les bourgeois Redux Pasolini’s hatred and spite towards the bourgeoisie is something constant throughout his political writings and it is clearly visible in the juvenilia now collected in Saggi sulla politca e sulla società (Pasolini

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1999). It is in the post ’68 period that Pasolini’s acrimony changes tone, from harsh criticism to shear provocation. In an article published in the Roman paper “Il tempo” on August 6, 1968, Pasolini talks about “a very contagious disease”: Io per borghesia non intendo tanto una classe sociale quanto una vera e propria malattia. Una malattia molto contagiosa: tanto è vero che essa ha contagiato quasi tutti coloro che la combattono: dagli operai settentrionali, agli operai immigrati dal Sud, ai borghesi all’opposizione, ai “soli” (come son io). Il borghese—diciamolo spiritosamente—è un vampiro, che non sta in pace finché non morde sul collo la sua vittima per il puro, semplice e naturale gusto di vederla diventar pallida, triste, brutta, devitalizzata, contorta, corrotta, inquieta, piena di senso di colpa, calcolatrice, aggressive, terroristica, come lui (Pasolini 1999, 1097). When I talk about the bourgeoisie I am not really talking about a social class, but rather a real and concrete disease. A very contagious disease: so much so that it has contaminated almost all those who fight against it: northern workers, southern immigrant workers, members of the bourgeoisie opposing the current government, and the “solitaries” (like myself). The bourgeois—let’s say this with a touch of irony—is a vampire who is not at peace until he has bitten the throat of his victim for the pure, simple and natural pleasure of watching her become as pale, sad, ugly, lifeless, twisted, corrupted, uneasy, guilt-ridden, calculating, aggressive and terroristic as himself.

Disease was to become the operative metaphor for the bourgeoisie all through the late Pasolini, culminating in the sadomasochistic gore of Salò (1975), and, as a form of self-hatred, derived from Pasolini’s masochism, it becomes overpowering in his writings. In an interview given after the release of Oedipus Rex, Pasolini comments: Anch’io, come Moravia e Bertolucci, sono un borghese, una merda, convinto che la sua puzza sia non solo un profumo, ma l’unico possible profumo del mondo. Anch’io sono dotato quindi delle connotazioni dell’estetismo e dell’umorismo, le connotazioni tipiche dell’intellettuale piccolo-borghese […]. D’altra parte bisogna convenire che ormai il piccolo-borghese non è altro che l’uomo (Pasolini 1967, 11). I am, like Moravia and Bertolucci, a bourgeois, a piece of shit, convinced that his stench is not just fragrant, but the only one possible fragrance in the world. I too am defined by the traits of estheticism and a sense of humor, the typical traits of the petit-bourgeois intellectual […]. On the other hand we must all agree that any human being is a petit-bourgeois nowadays.

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That the bourgeoisie is a not a class, but a lifestyle that has devoured and assimilated all levels of Italian society, including the working class, and that it is a disease of the soul, “un vampire” [vampire] that sucks up the real life of human beings, that is the theorem that Pasolini is trying to prove in his film and novel. Pasolini’s rage expressed itself and fed upon his constant warning, throughout the boom years, that this process of neoimborghesimento was a form of biological attack. Probably his most famous essay on this topic, “Studio sulla rivoluzione antropologica in Italia”, published June 10th, 1974, and subsequently collected in Scritti corsari is the culmination of Pasolini’s millenarianist meditation on the future of his country. The anthropological revolution is a term used to express how the societal changes at the super-structural level have now percolated below the socio-economic base into the actual genetic fabric of society: cultural changes have created a “una nuova matrice” [a new matrix] which “genera tutti gli italiani” [generates all Italians], as he puts it in Scritti corsari (Pasolini 1999, 310). It is indeed an “omologazione culturale” [cultural homologation] that makes all Italians not just think alike, but even look alike. In pochi anni si è visto (soprattutto nel centro e nel meridione) un popolo degenerato, ridicolo, mostruoso, criminale [...] Ho visto dunque “con i miei sensi” il comportamento coatto del potere dei consumi ricreare e deformare la coscienza del popolo italiano, fino a una irreversibile degradazione (Pasolini 1999, 310). The recent years have seen (especially in the Center and South of Italy) a degenerated people, a ridiculous, monstrous, criminal one […] I have seen “with my own senses” the compulsive behavior that consumerist capital recreates and how it modifies the consciousness of the Italian people, until it has reached the point of irreversible degradation.

It is this attitude towards his own country that pushed Pasolini to reject the Italian language in order to experiment with the newly discovered international style of “cinema of poetry”, the “internazionale stilistica”, a term Pasolini has used to define his own cinema along with that of his fellow modernist directors: Godard, Rossellini, Antonioni, Bertolucci, etc. (Pasolini 2005, 194). Pasolini’s exodus from the Italian literary tradition and his total absorption in cinema provides an interesting parallel to his travels to the Third World during the 1960s. This experience pushed Pasolini’s cinema not merely beyond national borders, but also beyond the boundaries of traditional cinematic representation in his attack on the ontological status of images, by bringing into collision fiction and

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documentary, art and anthropology, politics and aesthetics (Caminati 2007, 1—10). The return of Pasolini to Italy, to its economic hub, Milan, with Teorema is certainly motivated by another terrible realization. In an interview with Ferdinado Camon in 1969 he sadly broods: È un vecchio motivo mio, quello dell’idealizzazione dei contadini del Terzo Mondo. Anni addietro sognavo i contadini venire su dalle Afriche con la bandiera di Lenin, prendere i Calabresi e marciare verso l’Occidente. Ora mi sto ricredendo. Un tempo era giusto provare quei sentimenti (Pasolini 1999, 1638). It is an old theme of mine, the idealization of the Third World peasants. Years ago I dreamed of the peasants coming up from Africa waving a Lenin flag, recruiting the Calabrians and marching west together. I am changing my mind now. At that time it was right to have those sorts of feelings.

Pasolini, who once defined himself as a “Fanonian-Marcusian”, truly embodied the tiermondiste dreams of many European intellectuals of that generation; the Marcusian part of his appeal sounds intentionally similar to the cry for the inclusion of the sub-proletarian issued in the early Sixties by Herbert Marcuse in his One Dimensional Man.3 Pasolini became more and more conscious of the necessity to fight the new society of the spectacle shouldering his faithful Arriflex against that which Pasolini himself has defined as “l’irrealtà” [unreality]: it is the neo-capitalist world of audiovisual media presented as though its very omnipresence were nonideological. It is for this reason that in a passage from Heretical Empiricism Pasolini exhorts: “dobbiamo deontologizzare, dobbiamo ideologizzare” [It is necessary to create ideology; it is necessary to destroy ontology] (Pasolini 2005, 221). This appeal invites the reader to battle against the unreality of the flattening representation of the (then) nascent “society of the spectacle” (as theorized by Guy Debord) which directly acts, in an inversion of the relation between base and structure, upon the world of reality. The programmatic positions for the artist engagé of the sixties seemed to call for direct interaction between audiovisual media and the sites and processes of the ontological invasion, be it urbanization, the loss of traditions of the agricultural and sub-proletarian past, the evacuation of primitive religious sentiment, or the Third World. The artist seeks not an escape, but rather a possible geographic and temporal alterity. 3

Pasolini was very familiar with Marcuse whom he often likes to mention in his essays and interviews see Pasolini 1999, 1888.

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All of which questions the usefulness of either the realist or avant-garde tradition, which bring us back to Pasolini’s abiura.

The Heresy of the Two Teoremas Teorema, both film and book, present themselves as a new and improved épater les bourgeois, conducted on two different fronts (the literary and the visual) in order to create a fissure in the unreality of the new audiovisual machine. And this “certain realism”, this proximity to reality as it is purported to exist by Pasolini, is created—in an apparent oxymoron—through the deployment of Brechtian alienation techniques (Stack 1969, 89), which Pasolini has very consciously used from the onset of his cinematic career. Indeed, Pasolini shares in Brecht’s belief (in stark opposition to Lucaks) that realism lies in showing the “discontinuity” of the world, or, in the words of Ernst Bloch, “an art which strives to exploits the real fissures in surface inter-relations and to discover the new in their crevices” (Bloch 1977, 22). It is also in this sense that we should read his statements relating to the closeness of the cinematic apparatus (rather than literature) to the world and reality: “When I make a film I am always in reality, among trees and among people like yourself; there is no symbolic or conventional filter between me and reality, as there is in literature” (Stack 1969, 29). The stark, minimalist shots in the Teorema-film signal a progression from Pasolini’s earlier works, whether it is the post-neorealist mode of Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962), the allegorical comedy of Uccellacci e uccellini (1966), or the cinema vérité of the Appunti-genre and, in part, of the Vangelo (1965).4 The new “alienated” style of Teorema, as Noel Purdon has defined it, strains the Pasolinean notion of “free indirect discourse” to its limits, in a complex narrative pattern where all the members of the Milanese family see “with” the eyes of the filmmaker. Moving beyond the early experiments of participatory style, the image associée that promotes a point de vue partagé—to use Jean Mitry’s definitions (Mitry 2001, 294—302)—e.i. the semi-subjective shots that align the P.O.V. of Christ and Oedipus to Pasolini’s own gaze and vision, the ventriloquism of the “free indirect discourse” is here pluralized and disseminated throughout the different points of view of these “flowers 4

This change is acknowledged by Pasolini in an interview of May 1969: “Mi sono allontanato dalla fase gramsciana perché oggettivamente non avevo più di fronte a me il mondo che aveva davanti a sè Gramsci” [I moved away from the Gramscian phase because objectively I didn’t have in front of me the same world that Gramsci was facing] (Pasolini 2001, 2951).

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of the bourgeoisie”, making of Teorema the most stylistically daring of Pasolini’s films up to this point in his career. Teorema is about an unexplained visitor (Terence Stamp) who suddenly materializes within a comfortable bourgeois home in Italy. On the surface, the family he visits is polite, educated, self-assured, and attractive. Below the surface, their life is a confusing matrix of political and religious questions. Over a period of several days, the visitor has sex with every member of the family: father, mother, brother, sister and maid. Each one experiences, on her or his own terms, some sort of revelation or epiphany. The film starts in a gloomy Northern Italian factory, a setting intentionally recalling the great scenes of neo-realist cinema, with its cinema vérité-style of exposition standing in stark contrast to the episodes that follow. A journalist is interviewing the workers: the owner of the factory has just “donated” it to them. The journalist asks the workers assembled outside of the factory gates: “Hasn’t he then stripped you of the possibilities of making a future revolution”? With this not so obvious allusion to the collapse of working class identity as the oppositional character of the proletariat, and its assimilation into the consumerist structures of capitalist society, Pasolini sets off on his investigation of the bourgeois identity through the gaze of the Marxist intellectual. The stylistic choices of the film all reflect the “gaze” of the director, but refracted in such a way that Pasolini’s point of view is not confined to one character only, but, quite absurdly, operates through all of them. Teorema is a sort of first-person sociological essay, a realist piece in as much as Italian reality consists of a broken totality (as per the BrechtBloch aspect we mentioned earlier). The film plays changes on Pasolini’s personal and biographical themes, which Pasolini had already employed in Oedipus Rex, a Marxist-Freudian biographical reading of the myth (Caminati 2007, 97—109), employing onomastic references to this sociobiographical aspect: Paolo and Pietro, the director’s two names, are used for, respectively, the father and the son; Emilia, the region where Pasolini was born, is the name of the servant; and Lucia and Odetta, the mother and daughter, allude to light and to Proust’s Odette, thus metonymically emphasizing memory as symbolic of bourgeois storytelling. The presence of Ninetto Davoli (a friend who appeared in many of Pasolini’s films) as Angiolino the messenger and Susanna Pasolini, playing the old peasant who tries to feed Emilia, further highlight the personal dimension of the film. Moreover, each character undergoes a direct escape from the bourgeois world: Paolo, the father, strips himself of his possessions in order to become, in the final powerful last sequence “vox clamantis in deserto” (Isahia 40), an allusion to the intellectual and political loneliness

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of Pasolini’s self-inflicted isolation. The biblical reference is also echoed in the initial epigraph of the Teorema-book taken from Exodus 18, 13, “Dio fece quindi piegare il popolo per la via del deserto” [God led the people about by the way of the wilderness toward the Red Sea]. The mother, Lucia, who finds her freedom in random sexual encounters echoes Pasolini’s passion for anonymous sex, which ultimately played a disputed role in his murder. The character of the frigid bourgeoisie turned sexual libertine against the societal mores is mirrored by the other female character of the story, Emilia, the peasant-saint who speaks to and from Pasolini’s lifelong passion for his own rural roots, which are inextricably mixed up with his early encounters with Catholicism in his native Friuli. Emilia is indeed that component of Pasolini’s personality that points towards a “forza del passato” [a force from the past], as Pasolini has defined himself in Poesie mondane, a set of archaic beliefs formed in a pre-modern Italy to which the poet had always felt akin. The most complex of the facets of Pasolini’s personality is certainly represented by the son, Pietro: a budding artist and homosexual at once, he becomes the embodiment of the harshest criticism of Pasolini towards himself and the other “flowers of the bourgeoisie.” Those whose “fragrance” dominates the Western capitalistic world. An analysis of the character of Pietro will shed new light on the role of painting in the story. In the Teorema-book, the visitor and Pietro sit side by side in his room, leafing through the pages of an art book. In his nouveau-roman style narrative, which substitutes the objectivity of details for psychological analysis, this is how Pasolini describes the event: The picture that the two boys have in front of them is brightly colored— with pure colors: if one looks at it more closely it is like a network of outlines which leave free surfaces, triangles and rectangles that are slightly rounded. […] It does not belong to the culture of Cubism, that sumptuous culture. It is spare, extremely spare. Perhaps it is Futurism—but certainly not the dynamic and sensuous Italian brand. Something naïve and popular or infantile about it might make one think of Russian Futurism, of some minor painter—a friend of Eisenstein, of Shklovsky, or of Jakobson, who was active between Moscow and Petersburg or perhaps in Prague as a Cubist. No, here is the signature—Lewis, a friend of Pound (Pasolini 1992, 35—6).

Pasolini chose to mention Wyndham Lewis, with his specific brand of British avant-garde called Vorticism, because both in his novels and paintings his work is, as Jameson aptly defines it, “a reflection of the increasing and inescapable influence of mass culture in modern times, of what the Structuralists would call the Symbolic Order” (Jameson 1973,

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320), and what Pasolini has already more poetically and forcefully called “irrealtà” (non-reality or unreality). Wyndham Lewis’ painting, (probably New York if we can trust Marchesini’s judgment (Marchesini 1994, 112) or perhaps Red Duet or The Crowd, all painted in 1914) does not appear in the film: in its place, an album of Bacon’s paintings will fill the screen in extreme close-ups. Why does Pasolini abandon Lewis for Bacon, i.e. abandon English Vorticism to return to the human figure? Neither Marchesini nor other critics seem to have penetrated the complex nature of Pietro’s “initiation” (Pasolini 1992, 35). Pasolini’s representation of the reeducation of the young bourgeois is far from an endorsement. Indeed, Pietro represents all the possible contradictions of the non-organic artist. A few scenes further on, Pietro will pronounce the longest monologue of the film, a vague and narcissistic speech about the role of the artist (“One must try to come up with new, unrecognizable techniques”). The scene begins with a close up of Bacon’s Two Figures on the Grass (1954), a reproduction we have already seen when Paolo and the visitor were looking through the book. Inspired by the painting (and Pasolini very rapidly manages to merge the sexual and artistic coming out of the young artist) Pietro begins to create.5 But Pietro is not endowed with a magical, Hollywood-style creativity: instead, the episode is dominated by Pietro’s desperate attempts to be original, which culminates in his hopeless paintdripping, and eventually his urinating on the canvas. Paolo therefore represents, in the allegory of Teorema, the modernist artist enslaved by the system of the new. Pasolini’s doubts about avant-gardes in general and abstract expressionism in particular are present in much of his writings, although here in Teorema we have an explicit condemnation. The novel’s reference to Wyndham Lewis as a “friend of Pound” works as a starting point for the trajectory of the artist. In the film, because of the necessity of condensation typical of this medium, Bacon represents the “real” model that Pasolini wishes to offer to his audience. Both Bacon and Pasolini represent a form of heresy in the compulsion to novelty in modern art: both are strictly figurative, and yet are ill matched by traditional interpretations of realism either in painting or in cinema.6 As Deleuze has pointed out, Bacon gives prominence to the haptic, that “logic of sensation” through his use of the “figure”. The anthropomorphic image that, at the same time, highlights and distorts the human body is rendered 5

In a very interesting inter-textual play of referencing between the painterly and the cinematic, Bacon’s painting was inspired by Muybridge plate, “The Wrestlers” (Bacon 1996, 19). 6 See Benedetti (1998, 5) for the notion of “coazione al nuovo” of the modernist artist.

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through different means in Pasolini’s films as well, and this idea is used to very different artistic ends in Teorema in particular. For example, it is notable the use of wide-angle lenses in exterior shots to distort the contours of the picture and emphasize the sense of paranoia of the landscape surrounding the family, or in interiors, as during the family dinner. Other distortions include: the obsessively interminable immobility of the frame; the characters standing still, facing their destiny; re-framings from a slightly different angle that disorients the viewer; the obsessive repetition of shots, such as when the mother, Lucia, insistently looks at the clothes of the visitor abandoned on the floor of the family country house; the habit of shooting “against” or “into” the light of the sun (something of a trademark of Pasolini’ cinema, his “contro natura” shot)7; and the systemic use of decadrage, i.e. that framing from “abnormal points of view” to use Deleuze’s definition (Deleuze 1986, 15). The sequence of Pietro composing his painting on glass is shot so as to place the glass pane between the camera and the actor. In so doing the attention of the spectator is focused on the actual act of painting itself. This scene is a direct quote from Henri-George Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso (1956). Clouzot’s film is entirely focused on the creative process, and, for the most part, all we see is the paint left by the brush on a transparent surface. The audience is on the other side of the canvas, and only rarely do we hear excerpts of Picasso’s voice. Clouzot’s film celebrates the artist by enacting his disappearance, much along the lines of Flaubert’s modernist principle that the artist should be like God, “present and visible nowhere.” Pasolini, while on the one hand quoting Clouzot and Picasso in order to infer the artistic formation of Pietro’s character, on the other hand maintains on the screen his physical presence: his narcissism is still the core of this moment of the film.8

7

In his poem “Poesie mondane” written during the shooting of “Mamma Roma” (1961), Pasolini writes: “pecore/ controluce (metta, metta, Tonino,/ il cinquanta, non abbia paura/ che la luce sfondi—facciamo/ questo carrello contro natura!” [sheep/ against the light (put on, put on the 50mm lens/ Tonino, do not be afraid/ of an overexposure—let’s/ go for this contro natura tracking shot!] (Pasolini 2003, 1093). 8 Paolo’s artwork is actually painted by Giuseppe Zigaina, long time friend of Pasolini. In a 1948 review of one of his shows, Pasolini links Zigaina’s style with Braque’s and Picasso’s techniques (Pasolini 1999, 304).

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From Nouveau Roman to Tolstoj When in 1960 Pasolini switched his main focus of interest from poetry to film, quite a few critics were unhappy with his choice. Why exchange the sweet Muses of poetry for producers, distributors, and audiences: in short, the worst aspects of capitalism? Pasolini’s choice was dictated by what Rumble defines as a Gramscian call: Pasolini's choice, in the early 1960's to switch focus from the novel to film was a function of his overriding desire to engage in the reality of the present, to make an impact upon an audience quickly abandoning the book for the more immediate gratification of the movie-theatre (and later, television). This Gramscian urge to renew the intellectual's mandate during a period of great cultural and political transition explains his adoption of the role of regista civile (Rumble 1996, 6).

Yet beyond his political motivation of engagement and the nationalpopular mandate of the artist, and directly related to the never-to-beforgotten fight against unreality, it is important to mention another category central to Pasolini’s poetics in the 1960s: realism, which he himself defines as “a hallucinatory, infantile, and pragmatic love for reality” (Duflot 1983, 119). Cinema, which Pasolini goes on to define as the “written language of reality” (Pasolini 1991, 198) becomes the instrument, the medium that allows the artist to represent reality itself, not allegorically or symbolically, but with the objects of reality. It is in Pasolini’s conception of cinema as a new language that politics and aesthetics blend: I came to understand that the cinema is not a literary technique; it is a language of its own […]. I came to the idea that the language of the cinema is not a national language, it is a language I would like to define as “transnational” (not “international” because this is ambiguous) and “transclass”—i.e. a worker or a bourgeois, a Ghanian or an American, when they use the language of the cinema they all use a common system of signs, […] a passion for life, for reality, for physical, sexual, objectual (oggettuale), existential reality around me (Stack 1969, 29).

Given this hermeneutic distinction between the two media, Pasolini is very conscious of the problem of literary adaptation, of the possibility it raises of artistic and political miscegenation, as proven by his constant writing on the topic. His self-proclaimed heretic Marxism, his polemic vein, and, more importantly, his creative style—which Franco Fortini defined as “sineciosi”, that permanent state of un-synthesized dialectics which finds its stylistic corollary in the “pastiche”—register as the

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signature of Pasolini’s artistic output. From the early Friulian poetry (a home-spun Provençal, a Duchampian “ready-made” in the renegotiated tradition of the troubadours) to the narrative experiments of the Divina Mimesis (1975) and the imploded bomb of Petrolio (1992), Pasolini employs canonical forms of expression in order to disrupt them. It is in this vein that we should think of the meaning of “Cinema of Poetry”: an attack on stylistic convention of realism as a form of Brechtian Verfremdung. As explained by Rhodie At every point in Pasolini's fictions, written or filmed, Pasolini used various means, principally mimetic—citation, quotation, pastiche, parody, analogy, repetition, rhyme—to pull the spectator out of a fictional logic, beyond the edge of fiction, to its other side, to the “writing” which produced it. Writing is always present in the Pasolinian fiction, not to destroy the fictionality of the fiction, but on the contrary to emphasize it by starring it (Rhodie 1995, 3).

The nouveau roman style adopted for parts of the Teorema-book, along with other “scientific” styles of writing, is significant of Pasolini’s desire to subvert traditional mimesis in literature, particularly when describing the most alienated of all social classes, the bourgeoisie.9 Just as the nouveau roman sought, in Robbe-Grillet’s words, to explore objects without relying on their “ready-made significance”, to propose them as “purely external and superficial” (Robbe-Grillet 1965, 22), so, too, Pasolini sought to create a cinematic experience based on a gaze unmediated by traditional assumptions, and thus maximally approximating the object of description in its object-ness. This was one aspect of Pasolini’s quest for ontological reality. Pasolini admired the French writers ability to move away from “Proustian sentimentality”, and praised Butor’s “purely visual reality” (Pasolini 1999, 2742). At the same time the endorsement of this style is partial and filtered through a certain amount of sarcastic disbelief (as it is often the case with any avant-garde). Pasolini calls Robbe-Grillet “the poet of monopolies” (Pasolini 1999, 1319), and Butor “as empty as a mirror” (Pasolini 1999, 1652), thus seeing in them, symptomatically at least, a lack of engagement and social commitment. While the early works (up until the polymorphous Petrolio) extensively sampled Roman dialect in order to play with realism and the representation of reality, giving voice to all the possible registers of the 9

It is essential to understand how the early experiments with both Friulian and Roman dialect were very far removed from traditional realist observations, but were indeed closer to modernist semiotic experimentations of Gadda (in literature) or Duchamp (in the visual arts).

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novel, in the Teorema-book we have a parable of sorts—“this is not a realistic story, it is a parable…” (Pasolini 1992, 11)—mixed with the systematic use of objective and scientific tones. Many chapters are merely titled “data” plus a number; or they impassively introduce the topic: “Where the Initiation of a Middle-class Boy Begins” (Pasolini 1992, 37); or else they are obviously parodic: “A Girl in the Den of Virility” (Pasolini 1992, 58). The omniscient narrator offers detailed and detached descriptions, and launches into the literary only in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, as he does here in this Leopardi-esque description of a spring day: “but there is already the heat of a spring that is far advanced; and now what comes to mind are the “profondi silenzi” [profound silences] and burning, pleasant afternoon hours of summer. There come to mind too “i pomeriggi antichi” [afternoons long ago] of past centuries (Pasolini 1992, 54). Or when Manzoni is brought back into this pastiche of voices: “the landscape is the same as that through which some time before Paolo, the father, and the guest had ventured in their car as far as the Po, or, if you like the landscape through which Renzo reached the Adda on foot according to the story in Manzoni’s most poetical pages” (Pasolini 1992, 98). Pasolini’s anti-mimetic and anti-realistic film finds its sublimation in quoting its antithesis: the literary. This occurs in the case of a visual quote from Tolstoy in the Teorema-film: the visitor helps the sick father lift his legs on his shoulders. This borrows the gesture the servant Gerasim performs for his master Ivan Ilych in Tolstoy’s The death of Ivan Ilych. Like Teorema, the short story can be read as an allegory of bourgeoisie alienation. Ivan Ilych did exactly what his society demanded of him without asking any questions. Societal acts of submission (getting the right job, the right wife, the right house) suddenly appear in all their vanity when an unknown disease forces Ivan Ilych to stay in bed suffering terrible pains. His only source of relief consists of the young servant’s visits, who raises his master’s legs to rest across his own shoulders. While this can be obviously read as a sexual metaphor (in the same way as sex can be read as the trigger of the change brought about by the Visitor), the reference to the writer who is strongly associated with the tradition of 19th century realist novel may seem puzzling, given the rejection of that mode in the Teorema novel. Possibly, this is an allusion to Tolstoy himself, who in his final years famously rejected the form of the bourgeois realist novel and the bourgeois aesthetic in general as an expression of an unsustainable and inherently corrupt way of life, turning instead toward the utopian potential of the peasantry. This can be perceived as mirroring Pasolini’s trajectory, from neorealism to tiermondisme as a journey towards pre-

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modern alterity. Both painting and literary tradition are used in the Teoremas not as a simple supporting inter-textual mechanism, but as an escape from the dominance of a particular semiotic system. As W.J.T. Mitchell has pointed out, aesthetic disputes involving generic boundary crossings are often represented in social and familial terms, mirroring the collapse between the private and the public spheres, and signaling the break-up of the value-system of bourgeois family (Mitchell 1986, 112). The collapse of the structure associated with classical capitalism is further mirrored in the amphibolic relationship among the various artistic representations and media in both film and novel: the film points to painting and literature to challenge its status, the book uses the nouveau roman as an anti-narrative model, generating a number of genre pastiches (scientific narrative, parody, poetry, etc.) all of which undermine its own literary consistency. As part of his metalinguistic battle against irrealtà, Teorema inserts itself as a challenge to both modernism and realism. The final irony is that this is, indeed, a classic modernist enterprise. If the ultimate modernist impulse, according to T. J. Clark, is to imagine reality otherwise, which brings with it the rejection of all previous artistic systems in an attempt to create a new language (Clark 1999), then Pasolini’s own rejection of modernism and realism still operates within the logics of this quintessentially modernist move.10

Work Cited Babcock, Arthur. 1997. The New Novel in France. New York: Twayne. Bacon, Francis. 1996. Francis Bacon. Paris: Centre George Pompidou. Benedetti, Carla. 1998. Pasolini contro Calvino. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Bloch, Ernst, et al. 1977. Aesthetics and Politics. London: Verso. Clark, T. J. 1999. Farewell to an Idea. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Compagnon, Antoine. 1994. Five Paradoxes of Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press. Debord, Guy. 1994. The Society of Spectacle. New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema I: Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

10 Among the “five paradoxes” of modernism as identified by Compagnon 1994, is indeed both the affirmation and rejection of art.

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—. 2002. Francis Bacon: the Logic of Sensation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Duflot, Jean. 1983. Il sogno del centauro. Rome: Editori Riuniti. Fortini, Franco. 1974. The Writers Mandate and the End of Anti-Fascism. Screen 14, 1: 33—70. Jameson, Fredric. 1973. Wyndham Lewis as Futurist. The Hudson Review 26, 2: 295—329. Marchesini, Alberto. 1994. Citazioni pittoriche nel cinema di Pier Paolo Pasolini: da “Accattone” al “Decameron.” Florence: La Nuova Italia. Marcuse, Herbert. 1967. The One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Naldini, Nico. 1989. Pasolini, una vita. Turin: Einaudi. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 2005. Heretical Empiricism. Washington: New Academia. —. 2003. Tutte le poesie. Vol. 1. Milan: Mondadori. —. 2001. Per il cinema. Milan: Mondadori. —. 1999. Saggi sulla letteratura e sull’arte. Milan: Mondadori. —. 1999. Saggi sulla politica e sulla società. Milan: Mondadori. —. 1992. Theorem. London: Quartet. —. 1991. Le regole di un’illusione. Ed. Laura Betti and Michele Gulinucci. Rome: Associazione Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini. —. 1976. Lettere luterane. Turin: Einaudi. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. 1965. For a New Novel. New York: Grove. Rohdie, Sam. 1995. The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini. London: BFI. Rumble, Patrick. 1996. Allegories of Contamination: Pier Paolo Pasolini's Trilogy of Life. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Van Watson, William. 1989. Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Theater of the Word. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI. Peucker, Brigitte. 1995. Incorporating Images. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Purdon, Noel. 1977. Pasolini: the Film of Alienation. In Pier Paolo Pasolini, ed. Paul Willemen, 43—54. London: BFI. Stack, Oswald. 1969. Pasolini on Pasolini. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Tolstoy, Leo. 1991. The Death of Ivan Ilych. Short Fiction. New York: Norton.

ROMANZO CRIMINALE: THE NOVEL AND THE FILM THROUGH THE PRISM OF PASOLINI1 MILLICENT MARCUS, YALE UNIVERSITY 1

Direction: Michele Placido. Subject and Screenplay: Stefano Rulli, Sandro Petraglia, Giancarlo De Cataldo, in collaboration with Michele Placido (based on the eponymous novel by Giancarlo De Cataldo). Photography: Luca Bigazzi. Editing: Esmeraldo Calabria. Music: Paolo Buonvino. Sets: Paola Comencini. Costumes: Nicoletta Taranta. Cast: Kim Rossi Stuart (Il Freddo), Pierfrancesco Favino (Il Libanese), Claudio Santamaria (Il Dandi), Stefano Accorsi (Scialoja), Riccardo Scamarcio (Il Nero), Jasmine Trinca (Roberta), Anna Mouglalis (Patrizia). Availability: DVD, in Italian original with English subtitles; Warner Brothers. Synopsis. Set in Rome during the 1970s and 80s, the film offers a fictionally embroidered account of the Banda della Magliana, the most powerful criminal group ever to operate in Rome. Led by Libanese, Freddo, and Dandi, three friends with strong ties since childhood, the gang achieves its long-cherished dream of “Roman conquest” by pooling the ransom money earned in the kidnapping and murder of Barone Valdemaro Rosellini, and using it to fund a kind of criminal co-operative. Such resources, along with the merciless treatment of competitors, enable them to seize absolute control of the city’s’ drug trade and to develop lucrative forays into prostitution and gambling. The gang’s escapades bring them into collusion not only with the Mafia, but also with right-wing extremist elements within the government itself. Despite the fact that the film’s malavitosi seem to live in a parallel universe, they become tangentially involved with some of the most searing world-historical events of their times: the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, and the 1980 bombing of the train station in Bologna. One law enforcement officer, Commissioner Scialoja, has an intuition, early on, concerning the power of this criminal outfit which he doggedly attempts to track down, but it is the workings of internal vendettas and the Secret Service which finally bring about the organization’s doom: Libanese and later Dandi are killed in a settling of scores, and Freddo will be felled by an anonymous gunman, most likely an agent of the State. Women play only a secondary role in this chronicle of male bonding and jockeying for power—the glamorous prostitute, Patrizia, serves as both Dandi’s mistress and Scialoja’s occasional love-interest, while Roberta’s wholesome femininity leads Freddo to question and ultimately to reject his criminal vocation. Roberta is killed in reprisal for Freddo’s liquidation of a double-dealing gang member, and he himself is gunned down on the eve of his meeting with Scialoja, to turn state’s evidence.

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The relationship between Giancarlo De Cataldo’s novel Romanzo criminale 2002, and the eponymous film by Michele Placido, 2005, confounds any easy distinctions between source text and cinematic adaptation because both works hark back to a common ancestry which defies generic divisions and insists on the undifferentiated impulse towards poesis. I am alluding, of course, to the Pasolinian precedent, which conferred upon the Roman sub-proletariat a fascination, dignity, and mystery that bordered on the sacred. By elevating this subject matter to the level of the highest aesthetic seriousness, through the combined techniques of contamination and lyrical exaltation, Pasolini created a wellspring from which De Cataldo drew in writing his novel, and from which Placido drew, both collaboratively and independently, in developing his cinematic vision. Because Pasolini’s practice was itself polymorphous, spanning literature, cinema, and theoretical works, his inspirational function served to push both novelist and film-maker back to some anterior, imaginative source, so that the poetic impetus which fuelled the borgata fictions of Ragazzi di vita and Una vita violenta, as well as the films Accattone, and Mamma Roma, would find new life in the works of these 21st century bards. But a far more obvious starting point for a composite study of novel and film is the very title, Romanzo criminale, which foregrounds the literariness of De Cataldo’s original project, and is borrowed verbatim by Placido. In its very blandness and avoidance of sensationalism, the title gives priority to the authorial quest for formal adequacy to its representational task: how to invent a genre befitting this particular materia, or more simply put, how to match the noun of the title with its adjective. In privileging his generic label by raising it to the position of capo-testo, De Cataldo invites us to become literary historians, recalling the birth of the romanzo as a vernacular form, whose linguistic descent from the language of classical Rome is embedded in its very name. “Componimento letterario di carattere narrativo, di struttura complessa e articolata, e di ampia estensione, caratterizzato da libertà d’invenzione e di intreccio” [Literary composition of a narrative nature, a complex and articulated structure of ample extension, characterized by freedom of invention and plot] (Battaglia 1994, 46), the genre evolves from Greek and Latin antecedents in prose adventure stories, through medieval and Renaissance chivalric romance, to the Settecento and Ottocento novel of manners, to 19th century experiments in realism, and up to the most recent flowering of extended prose fiction, in a wide variety of sub-genres (Battaglia 1994, 46—7). However the historic association between the novel and the saga of serial adventures persists, and for the romanzo

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cavalleresco to become romanzo criminale no great leap of imagination is required—the violent gesta of the paladins of yore, with their loyalties, betrayals, quests and vendettas are easily translatable into the escapades of De Cataldo’s “malavitosi”, themselves obedient to behavioural norms, as codified and ritualized as those of their feudal forebears. Just as relevant to De Cataldo’s project is the novel’s generic embrace of hybridity and its indifference to the conventional rules of order, as Tasso notes in his commentary on Ariosto: Il romanzo (così chiamano il Furioso e gli altri simili) è spezie di poesia diversa dalla epopeia e non conosciuta ad Aristotele. Per questo non è obbligato a quelle regole che dà Aristotele della epopeia. E se dice Aristotele che l’unità della favola è necessaria nell’epopeia e non dice però che si convenga a questa poesia di romanzi, ch’è di natura non conosciuta da lui (Battaglia 1994, 47). The romanzo, (as the Furioso and other similar works are called) is a kind of poetry different from the epic and not known to Aristotle. For this reason it is not bound by those rules that Aristotle gives to the epic. And if Aristotle says that the unity of the fable is necessary in the epic, he does not say that it is appropriate to this poetry of romanzi that is of a nature unknown to him.

Thus it is the diffuse structure of the novel, its defiance of Aristotelian unity and the concomitant hierarchy of form, which defines the genre for Tasso, and this very refusal of regimentation is what recommends the novel for the representation of a world that is literally unruly, defining itself above and against the norms of conventional morality and the rule of law. But there is a competing force throughout novelistic history which has kept the genre on this side of radical transgression. The very impulse to challenge the codes of traditional literary decorum is tempered by the need to reach out beyond the narrow elite of avant-garde readers, to address a “lay” audience, attracted as much by the diletto of an engaging narrative, as by the utile of its challenge to critical thinking. It is De Cataldo’s successful negotiation of the generic claims of his own title, and Placido’s filmic re-working of them, which constitute the remarkable achievement of Romanzo criminale within the panorama of Italian cultural production on the threshold of the new millennium. De Cataldo’s obsession with genre is hardly limited to the novel’s title—it spills over into the thought processes of the two characters, who function as author-surrogates within the text: the ardently idealistic police commissioner, Scialoja, and the mysterious, genius-of-the-system secret-

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service operative, Il Vecchio. When Scialoja discards the hypothesis that Libanese’s assassination was a settling of scores, he does so on the basis of genre. “Le vendette non durano a Roma” [Vendettas do not last long in Rome] he muses. Qui la tragedia ha poco spazio di manovra. […] Questa è la città dell’eterna commedia. […] Intanto la tragedia si andava venando di commediaccia, se no di farsa” [Here tragedy has little space for manoeuvring. (…) This is the city of eternal comedy. (…) For the time being, tragedy was becoming veined with low comedy, if not farce] (De Cataldo 2002, 263—4). For Scialoja, on the other hand, the generic terms are theatrical in nature, given his vision of Roman life as an exercise in showmanship, and his self-deprecating conception of his own role as that of a bewildered member of the audience, helpless to influence the course of the plot. Il Vecchio also conceives of events in generic terms with a performative tinge. Despising the mass-media circus surrounding the collapse of the Berlin wall, Il Vecchio condemns the Italian news coverage for turning this significant development into “un’allegra operetta in costume” (De Cataldo 2002, 587). When he decides against writing an exposé of the national political scene upon his retirement, his reasons are of a generic nature. “E se si decidesse a vuotare il sacco? Vermi. Schifosi immondi vermi. Figuranti da commedia all’italiana! Si toglieva il dolore alle vittime e l’onore agli assassini. Così gaiamente. Italianamente” [And if he decided to empty the bag? Worms. Disgusting filthy worms. Figures from comedy Italian style! It took pain away from the victims and honor from the assassins. So gaily. Italianly] (De Cataldo 2002, 587). Although Scialoja and Il Vecchio see comedy as the “default” genre in a culture devoid of the possibilities for true tragic grandeur, De Cataldo rejects the limits of the theatrical metaphor and proposes, instead, the fluidity, the hybridity, and the radical freedom of the novel for the representation of life lived italianamente. Among the generic traits that De Cataldo exploits to great advantage is the novel’s penchant for polyphony. Romanzo criminale speaks in many voices, not just through its abundant dialogues, but also through the technique of free, indirect discourse, which immerses us in the thought processes of the individual characters, as well as through a mélange of prose styles, thanks to the insertion of police reports, court proceedings, pop-song lyrics, gang notebooks, and even verses from Dante´s Inferno. This pastiche of styles, so characteristic of post-modern aesthetics, has been a fixture of the novel ever since its inception (e.g. the Menippean satire of Petronius or the exuberant collage of Laurence Sterne). The result, in Romanzo criminale, is to heighten our awareness of verbal

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texture itself, as we move from bureaucratic documentation to vernacular repartee to modernist free-association and so forth. What emerges from these shifting registers is a sense of collision, of incongruity but also of paradoxical inter-dependence—the edges are rough in Romanzo criminale, the shifting planes jostle each other, just as the worlds of “i malavitosi” and the political and legal orders clash, ricochet, and overlap, like tectonic plates on the verge of seismic upheaval. Perhaps De Cataldo’s greatest destabilizing technique of all—and this, too, is profoundly in keeping with the tradition of the genre—is his equivocal historicity. The well-known chronicle of the “Banda della Magliana” forms the basis of this narration, but the straight-forwardness of De Cataldo’s historical account is immediately sabotaged by the romanzo label itself. According to Battaglia’s second and figurative definition of romanzo, “creazione fantastica della mente, fantasticheria, illusione” [a fantastic creation of the mind, reverie, illusion] and his third definition, “insieme di vicende, fatti, esperienze (individuali o collettivi) così singolari, eccezionali e talvolta incredibili, da apparire frutto della creazione fantastica” [assemblage of incidents, facts, experiences (individual or collective) so singular, exceptional, and sometimes incredible, as to appear to be fruit of a fantastic creation] (Battaglia 1994, 47) the term has come to be associated with a narrative of doubtful verisimilitude, even when it has a solid, incontrovertible basis in fact. In the equivocal relationship between chronicle and fiction, between the welldocumented escapades of the “Banda della Magliana” and De Cataldo’s 600-page narrative elaboration, there resides much of the allure of Romanzo criminale, which refuses to name its historical referents, and whose para-textual apparatus only serves to underline the historical question it poses. “In un passato molto vicino, una banda di delinquenti di strada tenta di impossessarsi di Roma. È accaduto davvero?” [In a very recent past, a band of delinquents of the streets tries to take possession of Rome. Did this really happen?] asks the back cover of the Einaudi Tascabile edition, 2002. Ironically, one of the few historical referents to be directly named in Romanzo criminale is the figure who points to an inspiration for the novel that supercedes the confines of the genre, narrowly construed as prose fiction in the vernacular. De Cataldo’s characters explicitly invoke Pasolini, referred to as “Il Poeta” throughout the text. One of the novel’s secondary personages, called Ricotta (the episode in RoGoPag cannot help but come to mind) makes multiple claims to a Pasolinian past. Ricotta counts himself among the “ragazzi di vita,” brags of having appeared in one of Pasolini’s films, admits to having had a tryst with the man, and

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boasts of learning to read and write at the poet’s knee (De Cataldo 2002, 39, 141). Also significant is the fact that Freddo chooses to watch the video of Mamma Roma in the wake of the shattering news that his girlfriend, Roberta, has aborted their child (De Cataldo 2002, 308). But Pasolini’s presence in the pages of Romanzo criminale exceeds by far such explicit allusions. The celebrity status of “Il Poeta” within the community of grown-up ragazzi di vita suggests that his representation of their world has become, in turn, a formative influence—the signifier has generated its own set of signifieds—and that the Roman sub-proletariat has come to live its collective condition, thanks to the poet’s mediation, in Pasolinian terms. The most obvious way, of course, in which Pasolini presides over the pages of Romanzo criminale is a linguistic one—De Cataldo has chosen to saturate his writing with the usage of romanesco both in the abundant dialogue, and in the stylistic mimesis of his characters’ inner thoughts. In passages of third-person reportage, the prose slips in and out of his characters’ subjectivities, to create an overall effect of what I would call “complicitous focalization.” This technique is immediately established in the novel’s prologue, where an unnamed malavitoso is assaulted by a group of young hoodlums. Pensò che potevano essergli figli. A parte il negro, si capisce. Pischelli sbroccati. Pensò che qualche anno prima, solo a sentire il suo nome, si sarebbero sparati da soli, piuttosto che affrontare la vendetta. Qualche anno prima. Quando i tempi non erano ancora cambiati (De Cataldo, 2002, 5). He thought that they could have been sons of his. Except for the Negro, of course. Pischelli sbroccati. He thought that a few years ago, just hearing his name, they would have shot themselves, rather than face a vendetta. A few years ago, when times hadn’t changed yet.

With this incipit, the reader is immediately alerted to the temporal coordinates of Romanzo criminale—the narrative present of “i tempi cambiati” and the “qualche anno prima” of a legendary criminality, when the mere mention of a name would be enough to strike terror in the hearts of the young. The fragmentary sentence structure and the use of Roman dialect situate us within the focalizing consciousness of the character, who formulates his thoughts as if in dialogue with an imaginary interlocutor, an interlocutor who already knows “il suo nome.” We will never know his name, just as we will always remain at one stylistic remove from the pure, and to us unintelligible, Roman dialect by which these characters process and communicate their experiences to their peers.

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In another exemplary passage, we enter the mystified consciousness of Dandi who aspires to the material elegance, for which he owes his nickname. Dandi era annichilito dalla magnificenza di casa Trentadenari. Mobili di disegno, tavolini di vetro, stereo con i diffusori ultramoderni. Lo schermo per il cinema, l’immenso salone con i grandi divani. […] Quello sî che era stile! Quello sí che si chiamava vita. […] Trentadenari lo prese sottobraccio, amichevole (De Cataldo 2002, 36). Dandi was annihilated by the house of Trentadenari. Designer furniture, glass tables, stereo with ultramodern amplifiers. The movie screen, the immense living-room with large sofas. […] That’s what you call style! That’s what you call life. […] Trentadenari took his arm in a friendly way.

Although the opening and closing sentences present a neutral, external point-of-view, the above passage leads us into Dandi’s overheated consciousness, as he takes the measure of Trentadenari’s wealth. But De Cataldo does not let us linger in this interior-decorator’s delirium for long—we are immediately led out of Dandi’s enraptured subjectivity by the over-friendly gesture of Trentadenari, who is taking the first steps towards exploiting the young man’s appetite for luxury. De Cataldo’s strategy of complicitous focalization is nowhere more evident than in his rhetoric of naming, for it is here that he signals his novel’s acceptance of the malavitosi’s own rules of engagement. The narrative itself adheres to the law of omertà, refusing to divulge the characters’ true identities. When the police stop Il Nero at the Swiss border and pronounce “il suo vero nome” (De Cataldo 2002, 309), the character knows that he has been betrayed, that he has been handed over to the other side, where his soprannome [nickname] no longer guarantees him immunity from the consequences of his misdeeds, and where his birth name renders him, once more, a subject of the State, susceptible to all of the regimentation and legal sanctions that gang life was designed to circumvent. We readers, therefore, never learn his “vero nome”—De Cataldo never “betrays” Il Nero, refusing to give in to the bureaucratic machinery of officialdom. Even as he splices the court records, verbatim, into his prose, De Cataldo scrupulously leaves out his characters’ legal appellations, inserting the formulaic “(omissis)” wherever the defendants’ identities should be supplied (De Cataldo 1994, 527—8), thus creating a page so graphically dominated by repetitions of this parenthetical and italicized term, that what leaps out at the reader is De Cataldo’s authorial reticence, his omertà, regarding the official, and hence legally actionable identities of his characters. This means that the narrative voice works in

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collusion with the gang’s most consequential mission—that of stripping away the social identities of its members, and re-creating them according to its own alternative code of behavioural and ethical norms. In replacing their given names with chosen ones, the characters’ assert their radical independence from the social structure within which their birth certificates inscribe them, and ratify their rebirth within a sub-culture that every vocal address to them reaffirms a new sense of self. Unlike the given name—not chosen, shackled to its genealogy, fraught with patriarchy, imposed from above by an earlier generation, which visits its history and its laws on the new-born—the soprannome bespeaks a relationship of equality, a network of peers who bestow upon an individual a “signifier” derived from the “signified” of that particular person’s temperamental or physical make-up. In this sense, the nickname is somehow truer than the given name, a genuine representation of the bearer, a highly compressed interpretation of an existence in progress. It would not be far-fetched to consider the custom of nicknaming a folkloristic version of the medieval Realist theory of language, in other words supranomina sunt consequentia rerum. Synecdoche (Freddo is named for his glacial temperament), metonymy (Libanese is “Orientalist” in his drug tastes), metaphor (Ranocchia has an “amphibian” sexuality), antithesis (Secco is decidedly overweight)—an entire panoply of figurative techniques link names to people in Romanzo criminale, making the process itself an example of the poesis that drives this Pasolinian world. The extravagant inventiveness of the nicknames that crowd every page of the novel, bombard us with reminders of the distinctiveness and internal variety of this criminal universe. De Cataldo privileges his art of nomenclature by giving it paratextual pride of place: his book flap contains a catalogue of dramatis personae worthy of the roll call of the “Malabranche”, guarding the 5th Bolgia of Dante’s Inferno. 2 It should come as no surprise that the film version of Romanzo criminale would respect the novel’s extravagant nomenclature, and Placido does so through means that are both graphic and narrative in nature. Most obviously, he imports De Cataldo’s paratextual list of characters into the body of the film, using written captions, on-screen, to name the members of the gang. Once the film’s prologue has given way to the inscription “ROMANZO CRIMINALE” in large red letters, we behold an over-the-shoulder shot of a prison entrance from which a newly 2

Compare the names in Malacoda’s demonic cadre—Alichino, Calcabrina, Cagnazzo, Barbariccia, Libicocco, Draghignazzo, Ciriatto, Graffiacane, Farfarello, Rubicante, etc. (Inferno 21, 118—23)—with De Cataldo’s directory of gang members: Botola, Scrocchiazeppi, Fierolocchio, Ricciolodoro Mazzocchio, Il Terribile, etc.

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released inmate emerges. A reverse shot reveals the face of the swarthy, unshaven observer, and underneath there appears the caption, “Il Libanese.” When he whistles, the camera cuts across to the second man, who establishes eye contact with Libanese under the caption of “Il Freddo,” as if the very act of recognition and reconnection had given rise to the naming process. Our own visual collusion in the exchange of gazes and written nomenclature makes us part of this closed, highly codified world, subscribers to the rule of omertà, which pits the criminal subculture against the society of officially given names, as well as against the laws that have put them in prison. To continue the graphic transposition of De Cataldo’s dramatis personae onto the screen, Placido introduces additional characters with lightning-fast vignettes of them, complete with written names and, in most cases, their vocations: Dandi zooms into the scene on a flashy motorcycle, after which we catch glimpses of: “Ciro Buffoni, rigattiere (second-hand dealer), Scrocchiazeppi, meccanico (mechanic), Riccotta sfasciacarrozze (car-wrecker), Fierolocchio, disoccupato (unemployed), Bufalo, un ragazzo agitato (a high-strung kid)” and ending with “Il Nero, un nazista (a Nazi).” This slick, fast-paced parade of characters, accompanied by rock music of the 1970’s and edited according to the MTV rhythms of our current age, however, is not the film’s opening sequence. It has been preceded by a childhood scene which made the rite of naming into an event of the utmost solemnity and weight. This baptism in blood (for that too will be shed, along with the boys’ “civilian” identities) is the gang’s foundational act— it establishes the inviolate bond that will link the lives of its three core members, Libanese, Freddo, and Dandi, despite the rival claims of romantic passion, individual ambition, and guilt that will conspire to drive them apart. It is this scene, so radically different from the prologue of the novel, which serves to deepen and expand the Pasolinian inheritance of Romanzo criminale. Placido’s commentary, on the special section of the DVD, is eloquent in this regard. I ragazzi di Romanzo criminale sono proprio i nipoti dei personaggi di borgata così magnificamente descritti sia da Pasolini che da Sergio Citti. E per questo all’inizio del film e alla fine, c’è un omaggio stilistico molto pasoliniano. The boys of Romanzo criminale are really the grandchildren of the shantytown dwellers so magnificently described by Pasolini and by Sergio Citti. And for this reason, at the beginning of the film and at the end, there is a very Pasolinian stylistic homage.

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Set in the late 1960s, the film opens with a joy-ride in a stolen car by four boys, accompanied by the music of the pop hit “Io ho in mente te.” Singing along with this irresistibly catchy and seemingly wholesome sound track, the boys win our sympathy for what appears to be an innocent, though somewhat risky endeavour—we cannot help but be caught up in the beat of the music, the synchronized, fast-paced editing, and the sense that we are witnessing a “boys will be boys” nocturnal adventure. However when they run into a police blockade, having ploughed down the officer standing guard, the sequence takes a dire turn, and we follow the boys to their secret hide-out in Ostia, where Andrea, the most innocent-looking of them all, slowly succumbs to the injury he has received during their rampage. Against this fatal backdrop, the naming ceremony unfolds, thus linking the origin of the gang with violence and death, as well as introducing the theme of destino that will haunt the three surviving characters throughout the film. 3 It is the dying Andrea who proposes the naming rite, and he does so in reaction to his friend’s report that “ la polizia s’è bevuta il Bavoso” [the police put the Drooler in the drink] The boy’s response to this news is whimsical: “un nome del cazzo si porta appresso una vita del cazzo” [you carry a shitty name throughout a shitty life]—as if the name were the cause of its bearer’s plight: “nomen omen”. “Per questo, noi il nome dobbiamo scegliere da soli” [this why we need to choose our names by ourselves]. In so saying, Andrea becomes Adam—he appropriates for himself and his cohorts the biblical right to exert power over the things that are named: in this case, their newly minted, socially marginalized selves. Or, to put it more bluntly, the freely chosen nomenclature will liberate them from the “vita da cazzo,” prescribed by their sub-proletarian lot. No sooner is this self-christening completed, than the police erupt onto the scene forcing the boys to flee, all except Andrea, who is held back by his injury. Scattered about the sand dunes, the other three boys cry out for help using their nicknames—sign that their new identities have taken root so quickly and so firmly as to resist the trauma of the chase. This, then, has been the true baptism, amidst the dunes4 of Ostia, where the characters will enact in embryonic form their function in the full-fledged narrative to come. As the film evolves, this childhood scene will recur at three pivotal points, with significant shifts in emphasis, depending upon the particular consciousness within which the memory unfolds. 3

The theme of predestination figures prominently in the commentary of Placido and De Cataldi accompanying this scene of the DVD. 4 In the DVD commentary, Placido confesses to his use of poetic license in “adding” the dunes to the seascape of Ostia which is devoid of them.

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The first such flashback, occurs after Freddo informs Libanese that he wants to leave the gang. “C’era un patto.” [There was a pact] Libanese reminds him. “Per sempre.” [Forever] “Queste regole ormai non contano più.” [These rules don’t count any more] Freddo responds. “Questa gamba vale.” [This leg counts] Libanese insists. “’Sta gamba è per sempre. Io me la sono giocata per difendere te e Dandi.” [This leg is forever. I risked it to defend you and Dandi] By invoking the film’s initial scene, Libanese forces us to re-think the traumatic event from the perspective of the one character who came to the rescue of his comrades, and for whom the resulting injury amounts to the sealing of a sacred covenant, “per sempre.” What has been heralded in this heated verbal exchange with Freddo, will later be fully represented as a flashback, within the consciousness of Libanese, in his death throes, now re-enacting the events from his partisan perspective. Still later on in the film, the childhood scene will recur as a flashback in the mind of Dandi, as he abandons his comrades in adulthood, just as he had done during the police chase among the dunes of Ostia. From the perspective of Dandi’s flashback, we realize that the foundational scene is being constantly re-written, according to the needs and obsessions of its protagonists. The final flashback to the childhood scene occurs, appropriately, at the film’s conclusion, in symmetrical relation to the initial sequence, and perhaps tethered to the posthumous focalization, of Freddo, whose newly slain corpse is shown sprawled on the steps of a church during the film’s final frames. In this conclusive return to the foundational scene, Romanzo criminale soars into the realm of poesia, offering a counter-factual happy ending to the childhood escapade, with Andrea emerging from the hideout in full health, and calling to his buddies to run along the beach with him, where they will be followed by a parade of jogging policemen, unable to catch up with their quarry. This supremely lyrical sequence, at variance with everything that has happened since the death scene of the boy, Andrea, in the opening moments of the film, may indeed be read as the deferred representation of the dying boy’s reverie, as well as Freddo’s “posthumous” wish-fulfilment fantasy. It is in this network of childhood scenes that Placido’s film reveals its most consequential debt to Pasolini. “At the beginning and end of the film there is a very Pasolinian stylistic homage”, the film-maker had stated, and I would argue that such homage goes far beyond considerations of setting (Ostia) or demographics (sub-proletarian youth), to acknowledge the genius of Pasolini’’s film theoretical insights. Hailing from the realm of memory and dream, the childhood scenes form an internal web of oneiric and nostalgic recalls—the sub-film of Pasolini’s “Cinema di poesia”

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(Pasolini 1981). Composed of “im-signs” , the primal, pre-grammatical, hypnotic, irrational language of pure cinematic expressivity, the sub-film underlies and fuels the conventional narrative surface of the more accessible and, therefore, commercial “cinema di prosa.” By adding this opening scene (absent in De Cataldo’s novel), and constantly flashing back to it as dream or reminiscence, Placido brings the subterranean circuit of Pasolinian im-signs into the foreground, making explicit, the way in which the film’s narrative is underwritten by “quel sotto-film mitico e infantile” [that mythic and infantile sub-film] (Pasolini 1981, 173) enacted by literally the mythic and infantile episode of the gang’s formation. In setting up the fabled past to which the adults Freddo, Libanese, and Dandi are intimately bound, Romanzo criminale thus becomes an allegory for the vital interplay between sub-film and conventional narrative surface on which all cinematic expressivity depends.5 If this analysis of Placido’s film has focused primarily on its Pasolinian sub-stratum, such an emphasis is not intended to discredit the considerable brilliance of its achievement, at the level of cinema di prosa, endowed with all its star power, narrative intrigue, visual hip-glamour, and catchy sound-track needed for block-buster success. The stunning performances of Kim Rossi Stuart, Claudio Santamaria, Pierfrancesco Favino, Riccardo Scamarcio, Stefano Accorsi, Anna Mouglalis, Jasmine Trinca, as troubled young people, seeking their way in a world of dark and prurient fascination; the sexual and emotionally charged relationships among the characters caught up in an impossible tangle of loyalties and betrayals; the nostalgic pop-musical re-evocation of the final decades of the last century—all conspire to make Romanzo criminale a triumph in the conventional terms that Pasolini ascribes to the cinema di prosa. The existence of the childhood past, however, so deeply ingrained within the subjectivities of the three main characters as to re-emerge at the moments of most acute crisis, offers us constant reminders of the underneath-ness of this film, of its reversion to a repertory of generative “im-signs”, which take De Cataldo’s prose novel one step further, by activating the poetic powers of the film medium, according to Pasolini’s own theoretical precepts. In so doing, Placido revisits the Pasolinian well-spring of De Cataldo’s text, and in the most profoundly cinematic terms, endows this

5

“Il suo fondamento [quello del ‘cinema di prosa’] è quel sotto-film mitico e infantile, che, per la natura stessa del cinema, scorre sotto ogni film commerciale.” [the foundation of the ‘narrative cinema’ is that mythic and infantile sub-film that, because of cinema’s own nature, flows in any commercial movie] (Pasolini 1981, 173).

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“storia di malavita,” with a dignity and a grandeur worthy of “Il Poeta” himself.

Works Cited Battaglia, Salvatore, ed. 1994. Grande dizionario della lingua italiana. Turin: UTET. De Cataldo, Andrea. 2002. Romanzo criminale. Turin: Einaudi. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 1981. Empirismo eretico. Milan: Garzanti.

IMPROVISATION AND NOVELISATION IN THE RECASTING OF ITALIAN IDENTITY IN NON CI RESTA CHE PIANGERE CARLO CELLI, BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY

The two premier comedians of their generation, Massimo Troisi (19531994) and Roberto Benigni (1952- ), co-directed a time travel comedy set during the Italian Renaissance, Non ci resta che piangere [Nothing Left to Do But Cry]. The film reached the top of the Italian box office appearing in the same year as Robert Zemeckis’s Hollywood time travel film, Back to the Future. Like many Italian comedies not classifiable as art film, such as the contributions of Carlo Verdone or Luciano Salce’s Fantozzi series starring Paolo Villaggio, Non ci resta che piangere did not receive international distribution or critical attention and remains largely unknown outside of Italy. The 1980s are often considered a period of transition for the Italian cinema marking the decline of the generation of the directors who had gained renown in the neorealist period of the early post war period and the art cinema explorations into the 1970s. Besides being a favourite among Italian audiences due to its genuinely funny content, Non ci resta che piangere touches upon topics of relevance to Italian culture, history and identity in a manner that deserves greater recognition and examination. An interesting aspect of the film is that it also spawned a novelisation. A novelisation is a prose summary of the film most often for dramatic subjects rather than comedy composed post facto which reveals many of the contradictions and false assumptions surrounding the idea of literary adaptation. Novelisations were often produced in the Italian cinema particularly in the 1970s and 1980s for films of relatively high box office success like Non ci resta che piangere. The novelisation format is considered the poor relative of both primary literary sources such as a novels, stories or plays as well as of the films of which it is, at times, merely a prose redaction of the final shooting script. Media theorists have

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written eloquently about the medium in terms of its relation to the original source or its negation thereof without any success in elevating its status.1 The author of the novelisation of Non ci resta che piangere, Anna Pavignano, was a screenwriter on other Troisi films including Il postino [the mail man] and has been a screenwriter for more recent directors like Alessandro D’Alatri and Davide Ferrario. Pavignano has also published a fictionalized account of Troisi’s life, Da domani mi alzo tardi [starting tomorrow, I will get up late], written as a dialogue with the actor as if he were still alive. The novelisation of Non ci resta che piangere with Anna Pavignano is particularly interesting due to the manner in which the film was organized and directed by Troisi and Benigni. Benigni described making the film in an interview which are confirmed in statements by supporting actor Carlo Monni that the film “was completely improvised and that there was very little by the way of a script.” Troisi and I had only recently met so the film was done almost instinctively, based on the extreme joy of our friendship. We became such good friends, so quickly, it was healthy but dangerous because it was so strong. Each one felt that since the other was there, we could rely on one another. So we made this film as if it were a game, without any sense at all… And the whole thing was completely improvised. In the morning we would go to the cinematographer [Giuseppe] Rotunno, a great artist. We did not know what to tell him what to do. This went on from August to December. Then we re-shot the entire thing. We did a first version that was completely incomprehensible. It seemed like the work of madmen, based entirely on fun and joy. We tried to stop the film’s release and write something, but we could never come up with anything beyond the idea of just going to shoot and improvising speeches on who invented shampoo, the letter to Savonarola, the meeting with Leonardo Da Vinci. That was also completely improvised. [Troisi] always gave me the part of the intellectual. I spoke to Leonardo about Freud and Marx and he spoke about scopa [a card game]. We drove the construction crew and the set designers mad because they needed to have some ideas about what the town from the 15th century should look like, but we did not know what to tell them. The sets were done by chance without any sense at all. That film is ugly and beautiful. It has this spirit of joy and light of friendship. When I saw the film again it frightened me because it is has that tremendous light of our friendship (Celli 2001, 135—136).

Given Benigni statements, it is clear that the film was neither based upon any text, nor adapted from a published play or novel. As a document 1

See Autelitano and Re 2006, Baetens and Lits 2004, and Baetens 2005.

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for the study of the film the novelisation of Non ci resta che piangere is the antithesis of the improvisational impulses that produced the film. In contrast the novelisation of Non ci resta che piangere was undoubtedly adapted from the final shooting script which, as Benigni mentions in the interview above, underwent numerous versions and reshoots. This is not always the case with novelisations. At times, particularly in science fiction films, a genre in which Non ci resta che piangere could arguably be placed, the authors of the novelisations take liberties with the subject matter with the result that the same contamination from film to novelisation that may occur from book, story or play into film. Analyzing the film with the aid of its novelisation imparts a lesson in the manner in which genres play off one another. Just as material may be excised from novel to film, similar additions and deletions may occur from film to novelisation, as if the transfer of information and thematic content from one medium to another necessitates and perhaps even dictates, some amount of change in content. The novelisation of Non ci resta che piangere has the merit of reproducing much of the actual shooting script or rather the transcription of the improvised routines invented by Troisi and Benigni on the set as mentioned in the interview above. Despite this attempt at prose recreation, what remains in the novelisation is, with some exceptions, a rather dry run-through of the plot of the film. In the case of Non ci resta che piangere the novelisation records the intentions of the author/directors which may then be examined more carefully for elements which appear in the novelisation but are absent from the film, providing clues for plot development. Thus the novelisation is a useful tool for the analysis of the film, since it provides an intermediary between the film itself, the shooting script (in this case unpublished) and the intentions of the authors. Within the film and the novelisation, the comedy routines mentioned by Benigni such as the pair’s fantastic meetings with Da Vinci, their attempt to stop Columbus from discovering America or their reactions to the austere regulations imposed by the philo-Savonarolian government of 1492, refer to the spectators’ commonly held understanding of history and culture. Comedy functions on the encounters and confusion between opposites, on the inability and resulting hilarity from figures from different social classes or of different sexes who are unable to assume the behavior expected of them according to societal norms. Due to the improvisational nature of the production, as described by Benigni, the film is essentially an anti-adaptation, something which pivots off of the improvisational verve of the neorealist or the commedia dell’arte tradition of practiced and competent improvisation. When Benigni and Troisi pull routines out their

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bag of comedic tricks, the sources are from their own theatrical experiences and success as comedians. The novelisation transforms this anti-adaptation into prose, and the improvisational essence of the original is lost although the themes of interest to the authors and the audience remain. Benigni and Troisi have roots in regional theater and television. Troisi developed in the Neapolitan tradition of comedian Antonio De Curtis— Totò (1898-1967) as well as actor, writer and director Eduardo De Filippo (1900-1984), in performances featuring the marked cadences evoking Neapolitan dialect and a corresponding worldview mixing fatalism and irony. Troisi examined themes of personal and familial everyday existence in the ancient traditions of the defining character of Neapolitan comedy, the maschera figure, Pulcinella. Benigni, like Troisi, was a product of local theater, debuting as a teenager in poeti a braccio [improvising poets] improvisational poetry contests, a tradition dating back centuries. Through his ability to memorize and improvise verse in hendecasyllabic meter, Benigni acquired a indigenous grasp of the form and content of Tuscan highbrow and low culture. Since the early 1990s Benigni has reprised these abilities by performing cantos of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy in the squares of Italian cities, at universities around the world and on Italian television. Benigni’s innate ability to mix low and highbrow culture, and Troisi’s ability to revive and adapt the Neapolitan theatrical tradition, are at the essence of their collaboration in Non ci resta che piangere and this is probably the reason for the film’s long-lived popularity. With Non ci resta che piangere Benigni and Troisi chose an historical period, the Italian Renaissance, which was the last period in which Italy was a centre of world progress and achievement. Historically, Italy has been characterized by regional centres of power, each having their own vibrant linguistic and cultural identities. Unlike its northern European neighbors, no Italian city or region after ancient Rome during its republican and imperial period was long able to enforce the language, or rule over the entire peninsula. This lack of political cohesion also had its advantages. The vibrant artistic and cultural tradition of the peninsula may be ascribed to the vitality of regional identities, which reached their economic and cultural heights during the Renaissance. Benigni and Troisi’s film is also set in the region of Tuscany, the cradle of Italian literary high culture. Italy’s most important authors, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and Machiavelli, wrote in the Tuscan tongue, a pivotal reason for the choice of Tuscan as the basis for an Italian national language/koiné as instituted through the educational reforms following the struggle for

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unification in the 1860s. It has only been with the recent diffusion of massmedia and particularly television, that this national language has truly been able to take hold in Italy and rival the sense of regional identity which has characterized Italian culture for centuries. Thus Non ci resta che piangere appeared at a key juncture in Italian cultural history, as two television comedians representing two opposite regional identities, Naples and Tuscany, conveyed their popularity in a film dealing with issues of Italian identity and culture. The Italian cinema has had an ambiguous relationship with Italy’s past. Films set in Roman times have their own genre, the peplum, an indication of the separation of ancient cultural identity with modern Italy. Some directors have made important comedies set in the past such as Alessandro Blasetti’s Nerone (1930) with comedian Ettore Petrolini (1886–1936), which included the Bravo, grazie! [well done, thank you!] routine featuring Petrolini as the Roman emperor Nero in a thinly veiled parody of Mussolini. There have also been peplum spoofs such as Totò e Cleopatra (1963) or the more recent A spasso nel tempo [walking through time] time travel comedy series (1996, 1997) by Neri Parenti. Italian films depicting the Renaissance period have historically been costume-drama biopics depicting the lives of figures like Beatrice Cenci, Lucrezia Borgia, the Medici dynasty, artists such as Caravaggio, military figures like Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, or Catholic figures like St. Anthony or St. Francis. Given the abundance of material in Italian history, it is noteworthy that the Italian cinema has not developed a wider tradition in films devoted to the Renaissance era. In fact many important figures such as Machiavelli, Dante, or even Raphael are rarely subjects of Italian films. The Renaissance costume-drama has actually declined in recent decades. Exceptions include Ermanno Olmi's Il mestiere delle armi [profession of Arms] (2001) about Renaissance era military hero Giovanni dalle Bande Nere and Pupi Avati’s I cavallieri che fecero l'impresa [the knights of the quest] (2001) about the shroud of Turin. If there is a direct antecedent for Benigni and Troisi’s Non ci resta che piangere, it is Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Uccellacci e uccellini [hawks and sparrows] with Totò and Ninetto Diavoli. Pasolini’s parody juxtaposed the locality of the medieval world with the tenets of Marxist theory. In the film, two Franciscans on a mission to feed the poor eat the talking crow accompanying them after they tire of the crow’s relentless spouting of Marxist ideology. A theme of Pasolini’s cinema is the warning against the elimination of indigenous culture in the face of mass consumer culture. Pasolini adapted classic texts to film, including The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, The Thousand and One Nights, Medea, Oedipus Rex. Benigni

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had experienced direct contact with Pasolini disciple Sergio Citti appearing with Diavoli in Citti’s film Il minestrone (1981) which depicted the pilgrimage of three beggars who wander around Rome and then Tuscany in search of a meal. In Non ci resta che piangere, as in Citti’s Il minestrone and Marco Ferreri’s Chiedo asilo [seeking asylum] (1979), Benigni plays a school teacher, Saverio. Troisi plays Mario, the school janitor, a factotum figure in the Italian educational system. The pair is caught in a thunderstorm and take refuge at an inn only to find themselves transported back to 1492, the year Christopher Columbus discovered America. As the film opens Saverio is anxious because his sister, Gabriellina, has suffered an unhappy love-affair with an American (NATO) soldier. Saverio, Benigni’s character, becomes obsessed with the idea of stopping Columbus from discovering America so that his sister will not become involved with the American soldier. In the film anti-American prejudice becomes a mark of contemporary Italian identity. America did enjoy a positive reputation in Italy and throughout Europe as a promised land for emigrants. However, a dominant intellectual current in the post-war period interpreting an America amara (bitter America) was introduced by writers such as Emilio Cecchi, thereby changing the positive war-time vision of the United States as the liberator and purveyor of a culture of freedom, into an emphasis on America’s difficulties with racism or economic inequality. Of course anti American sentiment in Italy and Europe has a long history. There was the anti-Wilsonian propaganda following World War I from European powers hoping to avoid the American push for national self-determination for smaller European nations, whether in the Balkans or in the Baltic. There was the dismissal of representative governments as decadent plutocracies by European fascists and Nazis preceding World War II. During the Cold War, in which Non ci resta che piangere was made, American standing armies serving with NATO in Europe blocked the spread of totalitarian regimes sponsored ideologically and militarily by the Soviet Union. One of the most acrimonious debates, during the early 1980s and thus concurrent with Non ci resta che piangere, concerned the deployment of nuclear missiles at the NATO base in Comiso, Sicily—a controversy which has since lost currency, due to the implosion of the Soviet empire which the missiles were deployed to deter. As stated above, 1985 was also the year of the release of Robert Zemekis’ box office hit Back to the Future (1985), a film with a Hollywood time-travel film story of a protagonist who travels back in time in order to correct an event that had obstructed a happy ending. Zemekis’ film returns its protagonist to the 1950s, the setting of the foundations of

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contemporary American popular culture particularly in the areas examined in the film with the spread of rock music as a harbinger for the evolution of racial attitudes or the budding tensions of the sexual revolution. By transporting their protagonists to the 1490s, Benigni and Troisi rely on the same narrative structure with protagonists who try to correct the present by altering the past. Benigni and Troisi chose the last historical setting in which Italy was at the epicenter of world culture and political development. Thus the themes examined are relevant on a wider scale in terms of the examination of Italian identity. The time-travel plot allows comic expositions concerning the contrast between ancient and modern times, in which the themes touched on by Pasolini regarding the importance of indigenous culture are treated with joyful absurdity. The inhabitants of 1492 are friendly and generous, inspiring a feeling of nostalgia for peasant hospitality in an underpopulated world. When Saverio asks one of the locals where they are, he is told they are in Frittole, the local town. Saverio insists on further information in the manner of a 20th century Italian whose world view is not confined by distance. The locals, however, are unable to conceive of a reality beyond their immediate experience. They answer that beyond Frittole there is just Frittole. The name of the town indicates the totality of local reality where Frittole is not just the town where they live, but is the only existing town in their experience of the world. Benigni and Troisi repeat the point several times in the film. They demonstrate that during the late 1400s life in Italy was so local that the concept of a wider world simply did not enter into the general mentality. Although set in Tuscany, Roberto Benigni’s home turf, there is no sense of regionalism in the film. Troisi’s character Mario is immediately accepted by the Tuscan residents of Frittole, without comment about the Neapolitan cadence of his speech. The very idea of regionalism, of distinct cultural realities in the Italian peninsula, is beyond the interest of the ordinary people of the period. Given the successful collaboration between the Tuscan Benigni and the Neapolitan Troisi, it is an issue which the comedians seem to wish to diffuse, arguably as part of a promotion of a post regionalist Italian identity. One of the central antagonists of the film, although he never actually appears, is Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498), a charismatic Dominican friar whose prophesies of the impending doom awaiting the Florentine republic and Italy so captured the attention of the populace that he was able to significantly influence city politics until he was burned at the stake. On their first morning in the past, Saverio and Mario laugh as their roommate urinates out of the window, a display of Renaissance era sanitary

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attitudes. The scene takes a tragic turn when the man is speared to death by a mounted soldier. Vitellozzo, the murdered man’s brother, played by Benigni’s long-time co-star Carlo Monni, explains the violence as the work of Savonarolian fundamentalists who have outlawed ostentatious clothing or any worldly display. Later in the film, a Savonarolian monk warns Mario in the ascetic tradition, “Ricordati che devi morire” [Remember that you must die], ironically recalling the admonition given to victors in Roman triumphs. Troisi’s response, “Mo’ me la segno” [I’ll write it down, right away], typifies the ironic and comic attitude in the film where the gripping religious and political issues of the late 1400s are dismissed as a hindrance of the pair’s ability to enjoy their surroundings. The Savonarolian fundamentalists have instituted an hour of darkness at noon where the townsfolk must shut themselves indoors and pray for salvation. The absurdity of this law is parodied when the pair compose a letter to Savonarola, asking for Vitellozzo’s release from jail in a skit inspired by Totò, Peppino e la malafemmina [Totò, Peppino and the femme fatale] (1956). The interaction between the Tuscan severity of Benigni as straight-man to the ebullience of Troisi’s Neapolitan cadences is a highlight of the film and the novelisation. 2 Savonarola has a mixed reputation in Italy. The arrival of the Lutheran Reformation was a severe blow to Italian cultural and political prestige, as Savonarola’s attempts to reform the Roman Catholic Church of the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, ended in complete failure. Savonarola’s efforts to inspire reform in the Church in the decades immediately preceding the Lutheran Reformation have been interpreted as a lost opportunity in Italian history. Unlike other past adversaries of the Church such as Galileo or Giordano Bruno; the Vatican has yet to rehabilitate Savonarola. It required a stretch of imagination to claim that there is a parallel between the Savonarolian fundamentalism and the political terrorism that dominated the front pages of the early 1980s as a simple questioning of elitist intellectual authority. However, the characters’ attitudes of indifference and nonchalance are evidence of a general approach to momentous issues which recalls the fatalistic endurance against authority that is a thread in the films of comedians like Totò or Alberto Sordi. Savonarolian paranoia is debunked further by scenes in which the comic duo attends church services in a brilliant parody of 15th century courtship rituals. In the film, weekly mass is not a setting for religious expression as much as for potential romance. The decisive factor in malefemale interaction, as depicted in the scene, is the gaze, the impact of eye2

Also in Parigi 1988, 146.

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contact. The power of inter-sexual viewing is mentioned, for example, in period documents such as Machiavelli’s irreverent Capitoli per una compagnia di piacere [statutes for a company of pleasure] where, contrary to the teachings of the Church, Machiavelli’s joyful company is required to stare at one another, thus vice derivative of visual stimulation, is obligatory. In another recurrent joke, Troisi’s character, Mario courts a local beauty by passing 20th century songs as his own compositions. He hums abbreviated versions of the Beatles’ Yesterday, the communist fight song Avanti popolo, the Italian national anthem L’inno di Mameli and Domenico Modugno’s Nel blu dipinto di blu. The contemporary sub-texts of the lyrics of the songs’ lyrics, which Mario cannot remember, are meaningless to the 15th century listener. However, the choice of songs and the manner of their performance also bear relevance to 1980s Italy. For example, the concept of Italian national identity as a construction of the Risorgimento-era is ridiculed in Troisi’s haphazard humming of the Italian national anthem, a patriotic ode central to the idea of the foundational unification of the Italian nation. The anthem’s lyrics, which Mario, like many compatriots from the 1980s, remembers only haltingly, were written to inspire and even incite Italians to action in remembrance of the glory of Rome and their duty, according to the National/Romantic ideology of the Italian Risorgimento, to reclaim national prestige. Troisi’s routine also debunks the reputation of Italy as a land of great musical traditions. Mario does not sing the great works of 19th century opera or even Neapolitan standards like O sole mio. For generations of Italians brought up before the decisive influence of nationalized media culture in the post war period, Naples was the centre of the Italian popular music. For someone of Troisi’s generation born in the 1950s, the focus of popular music shifted to the national “San Remo Music Festival” which had a highpoint with Domenico Modugno’s Nel blu dipinto di blu or to pop songs sung in the English language such as the Beatles’ Yesterday. At various points in the film the pair tries to break the spell that sent them back in time. Saverio performs a monologue that emphasizes modern technical inventions in the hope that the 20th century will reappear though an act of will.3 The words of the contemporary age lose their meaning when Saverio opens the door to a pre-industrial street-scene in an example of one of the film’s routines which was left out of the novelisation. Ridicule of what is modern continues, when the pair decide to adapt their 3

Perhaps an early reference to the philosophy of Schopenhauer that would appear in La vita è bella.

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knowledge of 20th century inventions to 1492. After comic digressions about the possibility of re-inventing electricity and the toilet, they meet Leonardo da Vinci, who seems incapable of understanding any of the inventions they propose. Benigni, playing Saverio, explains modern contraptions in dizzying comic nonsense—an adaptation of Benigni’s talent for improvisation and his love of word games. With the depiction of Leonardo da Vinci, the film continues the iconoclastic view of intellectualism or elitism touched upon in the references to Savonarola. Saverio unsuccessfully attempts to explain commonplaces the 20th century commonplaces to Leonardo such as Freudian psychoanalysis or the labour-union system in a piece that proposes the inherent absurdity of the language and ideology of modernity. The industrial codification of reality becomes a technocratic babble recalling Pasolini’s warnings about the transformation of the Italian from a language based on poetic forms to one based on technocratic forms. Saverio reduces the ideological and academic constructs (psychoanalysis, Marxism) popular in the 20th century, to a few phrases that cannot be understood by the Renaissance genius, Leonardo Da Vinci. Commonplaces about historical representation are turned on their head in a joyful carnival. The weight of Italian history becomes useless nonsense, freeing the Italian spectator from the overwhelming weight of past Italian achievements. The encounter between Benigni and Troisi’s post-industrial, revolutionary world and the Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci, goes to the very heart of the question of Italian self-perception in the 1980s. The comic duo of Benigni and Troisi go back to an important starting point of Italian identity, the period preceding the downfall of the Italian city-state system with the French invasions in 1494. Before becoming the battleground for the hegemonic ambitions of Northern European powers in the 1500s, Italy was a center of the intellectual and cultural achievement of the Western world. The shift that Benigni’s and Troisi’s generation experienced was the definitive transformation of a local, Catholic, agricultural, patriarchal culture with roots were in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, into a nationalized culture taking cues from a mass-media modeled on America. The film was made after the de-regulation period of Italian television broadcasting in the mid 1970s, which led to the further development of a largely uncensored media. Given the setting of Non ci resta che piangere in the fateful year of discovery 1492, the main example of modernity and culprit is, as might be expected, the United States. Saverio’s initial explanation for his desire to stop Columbus from reaching the Americas was to improve his sister’s love-life. However, the routine has deeper political and cultural

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implications, particularly after the film’s comic dismissal of Savonarolian themes. Benigni had established the roots of this premise in his television program Onda libera [free wave], where his alter-ego, the Tuscan country bumpkin Mario Cioni, quite correctly points out that Columbus had not been interested in discovering America but was trying to reach the Far East. In Cioni’s comic re-telling of history, a group of indigenous Americans disguised themselves as Russians and attempted to give Marco Polo directions to America instead of China. Luckily, Cioni states, Polo was too clever for them, and was able to reach China, but Columbus was not able to do so (Benigni 1992, 31). The routine is a clever parody of history but also has an undercurrent of protest against American influence over European culture repeated explicitly in Non ci resta che piangere. Saverio’s image of America focuses on the sins of American expansionism such as the conquest of Indian territories and inventions such as the electric chair—a veiled reference to the eventual elimination of capital punishment in Europe following abundant abuse by continental regimes during World War II. Saverio’s exclaims how Americans have done nothing but evil and challenges Mario to name one good American. Mario’s attempts: the Beatles, Cassius Clay, and Hemingway, are rejected by Saverio who explains that Clay was an African whose ancestors were brought to America by the slave-traders, the Beatles are English, and in a comic touch absent from the film but extant in the novelisation, Hemingway is Cuban. The film has three main magical events: the time-travel sequence between the stormy night and the morning in 1492, the finale in which Leonardo da Vinci appears with a fully functional steam locomotive made from Saverio’s brief instructions and the actions of the angelic/warrior figure Astriah. The main difference between film and novelisation lies with the character of Astriah. In the novelisation Mario enjoys a brief love affair not only with the young Tuscan beauty Pia but also with Astriah who appears in the film as an impediment to Mario’s aims to change history. The love story between Astriah and Mario is introduced as a complicating factor in the comic duo’s desire to change history by blocking Columbus’ voyage. The result, as is the case with many adaptations of novels, stories or plays to film, is that with the novelisation of Non ci resta che piangere plot details also take a back seat to filmic demands. Whether Astriah’s character was reduced from film to novelisation or whether Anna Pavignano embellished the character for the novelisation is a matter for further study. What is interesting is the manner in which both film and novel received changes effecting its peripheral organization, but not the essence of the work itself.

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The film’s premise of Saverio’s plan to stop Columbus so that his sister could avoid the unhappy love-affair with the American soldier is resolved when Mario promises to marry Saverio’s sister. Then the two spot a train. Rather than a return to the 20th century and the closed railwaycrossing that opens the film, the train is conducted by their friend Leonardo Da Vinci who manufactured it from Saverio’s brief explanation and sketch. The image of the train is a symbol of the 19th century Industrial Revolution, which first brought changes into the lives of peasants in the agricultural world of the Italian Renaissance. The disappearance of the train, at the beginning of the film at the railroadcrossing, initiates the time-travel back to the days before Europe was influenced by America and modernity. Therefore Leonardo is a preColumbian intellectual whose ability to arrive at a pragmatic result from a summary drawing by Saverio points to a sense of nostalgia for an authentic culture unencumbered by larger the influences of modernity. The finale reveals the film’s sense of optimism for Benigni and Troisi’s generation to challenge stereotypes, whether regional or biographical as is the case with Leonardo whose reputation as a scattered-brained genius is debunked by his ability to make a functioning locomotive.

Works Cited Autelitano, Alice and Valentina Re, ed. 2006. Il racconto del film / Narrating the film. La novellizzazione: dal catalogo al trailer / Novelization: from the catalogue to the trailer (XII International Films Studies Conference). Udine: Forum. Baetens, Jan and Marc Lits, ed. 2004. La novellisation: du film au roman. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Baetens, Jan. 2005. Novelisation, a Contaminated Genre. Trans. Pieter Verrmeulen. Critical Inquiry 32, 1: 43—60. Benigni, Roberto. Quando Benigni ruppe il video. Rome: RAI ERI, 1992. Benigni Roberto and Massimo Troisi. 1994. Non ci resta che piangere. Ed. Anna Pavignano. Milan: Mondadori. Carlo Celli, 2001. The Divine Comic. The Cinema of Roberto Benigni. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Parigi, Stefania. 1988. Roberto Benigni. Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane.

TEXT-IMAGE, DEPARTURE AND RETURN: IO NON HO PAURA VIVA PACI, UNIVERSITÉ DE MONTRÉAL

Faccio così, passo di lì, ti prendo e ti porto via. I do it like this, I pass by, I seize you and take you away —Vasco Rossi.1

Between the text and the image, the difference is that the text presents meanings and the image presents forms (Nancy 2002, 7). Here is a reassuring cliché regarding the history of cinematographic forms, from the advent of the cinema to the present day2. Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy ironically evokes this untrue banality in his epigraph to an exhibition at the “Centre Pompidou” on the relationship between text and image, between words and figures in art (Nancy 2002, 7). In fact, this commonplace is dismantled at the heart of our contemporary culture in which the borders between meaning and form are continually asserted only to be transgressed, whether in artistic practice or in theoretical discourse. Iconologist Hubert Damisch effectively summarizes this state-of-affairs, 1

To begin a text with the epiphany of such an “affinità elettiva” [elective affinity], is no doubt a pleasure for the writer: all the fans of Vasco Rossi know that his song Ti prendo e ti porto via was born after reading Niccolò Ammaniti’s novel (Ti prendo e ti porto via, Milano, Mondadori, 1999). Ammaniti, for his part, recounts often his relationship with the singer-songwriter. See the broadcast of Web-Tv Universo: www.universotv.it/pannello/ins_video/archivio.asp?cat=7, entitled “Perso in trasformazione” from 3 July 2005, hosted by Giacomo Manzoli www.universotv.it/pannello/ins_video/video.asp?id=146 [consulted 1 August 2007. 2 The debate on the relations between cinema and literature regarding the necessity/permission/ability/appropriateness (the terms vary depending on the viewpoint of the participants in the debate) of the cinema’s appropriation of literary works, is of great concern to the contributors (on cinema) in the journals related to the field. For a general diachronic panorama see Brunetta 2004.

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asserting a continuous “becoming-an-image of language”, an “iconization of language” and, more generally, a “becoming-discourse of images”. Between text and image—and countless objects of study would support this affirmation—there materializes not so much a transposition from one system of signs to another, as much as a reciprocal crossing from the text to the image and from the image to the text (Damisch 2002). Having raised this type of reading of the relationships between text and image, I avoid the stale questions regarding adaptation and, for example, the question of translatability (from Victor Sklovskij onwards), or that of fidelity (from Jean Mitry onwards).3 Semiotics, narratology and textual analysis have extensively dealt with that mesmerizing pair, literature and cinema. In a more circumscribed sphere, I agree with the line of thought that underscores both the visual aspects of a literary text, and the literary strategies of a visual text, with the conviction that the specificity of each of these is created precisely within their relationships—relationships that are already inter-woven and constructed within the text itself, and that, outside the text, refer on to numerous other texts. If “meaning” is in the “resending”, in the “relationship”, in the “passage”, then we find ourselves within the perspective, now somewhat in vogue, of “inter-mediality,”4 a perspective which also participates in the realm of thought presented by Jean-Luc Nancy and Hubert Damisch: dynamic, attentive to forms and to meaning, but above all to relationships. According to this point-of-view, a verbal text can create images just as a visual text can correspond to a verbal discursive organization. Departing from these initial considerations, I propose to examine some aspects that I shall define for the time being as respectively visual and textual of the novel Io non ho paura by Niccolò Ammaniti as well as of Gabriele Salvatores’ film of the same name. The book came out at the end of 2001, while the film appeared at the beginning of 2003. It is therefore possible to speak of an adaptation of the novel. In this work, however, I will particularly take into consideration the knot of relationships that present themselves to the reader-spectator, a knot that goes beyond the simple translation of the written text into film, as the notion of adaptation would imply. An adaptation can merely steer a course between the epithets

3

For an up-to-date, annotated course through the theories of adaptation, see Dusi 2003. 4 See Mariniello 2000, Gaudreault et al. 2000; see as well all the issues of the journal Intermédialités. Histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres, des techniques, from 2003 onward.

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of “faithful” and “free”: we shall see how this notion is ill-suited to capturing some interesting aspects of the two works in question.

Beyond Adaptation: The Author and the Invaluable Intermedial Touch La fedeltà è uno dei miei problemi principali [Faithfulness is one of my main problems] —Viola Unaltravolta, Piccolo mondo e cose di pessimo gusto [Small world and things in very bad taste]

On the literary, editorial, as well as on contemporary mass-media scenes5, Niccolò Ammaniti, decidedly, is an interesting case: an online “Fang-Club” existed for some years now, named after the collection of stories Fango (1996); Vasco Rossi, wrote a song entitled Ti prendo e ti porto via was inspired by the eponymous novel; Salvatores, first made a film and then a theatrical production of Io non ho paura: 14 danze per bambini intorno a un buco. Ammaniti skilfully passes through diverse media: he pours his energy into the Internet, rock music, scholarly periodicals (in fact he has published the story, Fa un po’ male in Micromega), the daily press (the story Bucatini e pallottole was published in the form of a feuilleton in Unità), and comic strips. For example L’Ultimo capodanno is a story published in the Fango collection, which later became a novel, and finally a film, directed by Marco Risi. His intention was to accompany the film’s release with the publication of a cartoon of the same name. However Risi’s film met with little success and

5

The example of his last novel, Come Dio comanda (2006) seems to demonstrate, starting with the cover illustration, how much the author is considered by his editor to be a “cavallo da corsa” [a rising star] to watch. In fact, the graphic project of the hard-back edition displays no written characters on its front (Art Director: Giacomo Gallo, graphic design: Cristiano Guerri). A lightning bolt rends the dark blue of a stormy night. That is all, no title, no author, only a single transparent sheath on which the letters, printed in white, are scarcely visible, with the name of the author and the title. It is understood, therefore, that if this sheet were to disappear, an ephemeral outer-text, the authority of the novel would manifest itself in some other way, surviving even without the author’s name on the cover. Ammaniti won the 2007 Premio Strega with Come Dio comanda, and Gabriele Salvatores worked on the adaptation of this last novel (the film’s release is scheduled for late 2008), with Ammaniti still in charge of the screenplay.

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the cartoon would only appear at a later point6, along with two other stories by Ammaniti made into the comic strips: Bucatini e Pallottole and Fa un po’ male (illustrated by Davide Fabbri and adapted by the same Daniele Brolli who, in 1996, had edited the anthology for Einaudi with the rather happy title, Gioventù cannibale whose opening story is Seratina by Ammaniti). Bucatini e pallottole was a “screenplay for a film that nobody wanted to do” (Ammaniti and Brolli 2004, p.n.n.). The “romanzo di gioventù” [novel of youth], Branchie, would have generated a huge shooting project in India, but it was never made and would later give rise to Francesco Ranieri Martinotti’s film.7 As in the case of Io non ho paura, if the cinema “band-wagon” passes by, then Ammaniti jumps aboard.8 However we must admit that when he does dedicate himself to cinema, his very pleasing, capable touch does not always elicit the “Re Mida” effect, which first Einaudi, and later Mondadori, permitted him to unleash meticulously. From the perspective of themes and narrative modes, Ammaniti’s horizon clearly appears to belong to the same media constellation of cinema;9 and for Io non ho paura the areas of intersection with the cinema extend further10. Io non ho paura is first an idea of a film, an image 6

L’Ultimo capodanno (1998); L’Ultimo capodanno, film by Marco Risi, screenplay by Niccolò Ammaniti, 1998; it appeared as a comic strip in 2004 (Einaudi). 7 Branchie (1999), directed by Francesco Ranieri Martinotti, screenplay by Niccolò Ammaniti, leading role Gianluca Grignani. 8 Ammaniti is also the author of the screenplay (and book) of Il Siero della vanità by Alex Infascelli, 2004. Infascelli also directed Almost Blue (2000), based on the homonymous novel by Carlo Lucarelli. The video-clip of the song Basta poco by Vasco Rossi (2005), produced by Swan and staged by Enrico Brizzi, seems steeped in the imagery of media sabotage, especially that of television, which has much in common with Il Siero della vanità: it is still the result of those “affinità elettive”, which, in note 1, were mentioned in regards to this text. 9 Besides the analysis of works, this connection reappears in numerous interviews with the author; for example in “La Letteratura è un imbuto”, edited by Giordano Tedoldi, in the Web column “KataLibri” [the page is no longer online]: “più che la letteratura, mi ha influenzato il cinema degli anni ’70” [more than literature, the cinema of the 1970s has influenced me]. 10 In another interview, “Narratore d’immagini”, edited by Corrado Premuda, in the Web column “FuciNetWork”, www.fucine.com/print.php?url=archivio/fm48/niccolo_ammaniti.htm&id=783, Ammaniti affirms: “Ho una visione quasi di un film in realtà, che poi descrivo attraverso le parole. Come se vedessi delle cose e contemporaneamente poi le arricchissi attraverso la scrittura. Però la prima fase è sicuramente molto visiva. Quindi è come se i personaggi me li vedessi… le azioni, i luoghi… e c’è anche una

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carved, perhaps, from the cinematographic memory of the auteur/author himself: fields of grain dominated by a dazzling sun, paralyzing heat, children on bicycles who, from Ischiano Scalo of Ti prendo e ti porto via to Acqua Traverse, have not ceased pedalling, and the story of martyred bodies and abductions (a clear break from Branchie). Then, since—we like to think—Ammaniti is fundamentally a great narrator, his writing gains momentum, the idea surpasses the stages of synopsis and a cinematic treatment and becomes the novel we know. The novel builds on the success of its predecessor, Ti prendo e ti porto via, winning an avalanche of prizes, and Gabriele Salvatores decided to make it into a film. Once again, it was Ammaniti who handled the screenplay. Taking into account this movement of departure and return, from the filmic into the literary and back again into the filmic, the idea of adaptation clearly appears inappropriate for Io non ho paura. The classic model of adaptation of a literary text for the screen consists of the recomposition of the work in an expressive modality, distinct from that of the original11: in short, it deals with the transposition of a theme from one system of signs into another. Adaptation is, therefore, a “trans-codal” manipulation, and essentially “trans-media”. My argument is that Io non ho paura, in its novel form, already makes use of some codes of cinematic language: those of camera movements; the use of sound; the chronological organization in sequences; a time divided into blocks of the present rolled up into themselves, that could properly be called “sequence plans” (Rancière 2003, 129).12

trama poi che può essere una trama come una specie di scaletta per una sceneggiatura. Quindi forse è per quello che i miei libri sono così visivi. Perché è la condizione attraverso la quale scrivo” [In reality, I almost have a vision of a film, that I then describe with words. As if I saw things and simultaneously then enriched them through writing. However, the first phase is definitely very visual. Thus it’s as if I were visualizing, for myself, the characters… the actions, the places… and there is also a plot that then can be a plot like a kind of outline for a screenplay. So perhaps it’s because of this that my books are so visual. Because of the conditions under which I write]. 11 In this model, as indicated above, adaptation can be judged as faithful (an illustration of what the words communicate and a possible amplification of some aspects) or as free (with digressions from and comments upon the text’s meaning). 12 This concerns an idea of Jacques Rancières regarding time in the novel La Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette by Bernanos, that functions precisely in a sequential mode, which aids Rancière in developing an anti-adaptation discourse between the Bernanos novel and the Bresson film.

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The brief passage of the novel cited here below can act as a metonym, pars pro toto, for the other numerous manifestations of cinematic codes in the novel: Me la sono messa sulle spalle, anche se non mi reggevo in piedi dalla fatica. – Chissà dove stanno gli altri? Dov’erano passati l’ordine delle spighe era sparito, molti steli erano piegati in due e alcuni erano spezzati. Abbiamo seguito le tracce che portano verso l’altro versante della collina. Maria mi ha stretto la mano e mi ha conficcato le unghie nella pelle. – Che schifo! Mi sono voltato. Lo avevano fatto. Aveva impalato la gallina (Ammaniti 2001, 19—20). I raised her onto my shoulders, even though I was barely able to stay on my feet out of weariness. ‘Who knows where the others are?’ Where they had passed, the arrangement of the ears of corn was disturbed, many stalks were bent in half and others were broken off. We followed the tracks that took us toward the other side of the hill. Maria clenched my hand and drove her nails into my skin. ‘How disgusting!’ I turned around. They had done it. They had impaled the hen.

In this passage the two children trudge along; reading it we “see” nothing other than the two figures, both hot, struggling up the slope. A sound, that of a small shrill voice cries “Che schifo!” [how disgusting!], enables a change of “inquadratura” [framing], a “contro-campo” [reverseangle shot]. This provides a “raccordo sul suono” [connection through sound], which allows us as well as the characters to change the “framing” and discover the hen martyred by the playmates who had passed there before them.13 In this novel, the découpage of reality and of the visible is analytical; the writing dissects the “campo” [field] and shows us, above all, the “inquadrature strette” [tight framings] around those fragments of reality 13

Strangely enough, the actual rendering into film did not take advantage of these peaks of (audio-)visuality that were already present in the novel. In one single plane the spectator sees the impaled hen and the children looking at it, and only afterwards comes Maria’s exclamation: no sound connection, no reverse-angle shot, no discovery. As we will see in the final section of this article the film will play with its relation the literary on another level.

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that the protagonist can perceive in the same order in which these fragments assail him. In analyzing Ammaniti’s work, I find it necessary to insist on the fact that a large number of cinematic traits are displayed in the literary text, in such a way as to make that medium’s mediatic nature become multiple: in a certain sense, this is a novel that contains a film. Nor does this pertain exclusively to the fact that the novel was conceived as a filmic idea in the author’s mind, and that the novel underwent the transformation, in tune with our century—according to Damisch’s expression cited above—of the “divenire immagine [in movimento] del linguaggio” [becoming image (in motion) of language]. The most relevant aspect is that Io non ho paura appears constructed, in the eyes of the spectator, according to a true découpage, through a spatialization and visualization of the narrative segments, a quick rhythm, as if it were the result of the contingencies of cinematic technique. Such a mode of proceeding in literature is certainly not new, but in this case it represents the novel’s central characteristic. In speaking of a text’s “cinematographicity”, there are illustrious precedents. One could cite André Bazin, who defines Bresson’s film, Journal d’un curé de campagne as literary, while the novel of the same name, by Bernanos, is swarming with images (Bazin 1985, 107—127). Discussing the important movement of departure and return between novel and film, Bazin concludes: “le plaisir esthétique qu'on peut épruver au film de Bresson, si le mérite en revient évidemment, pour l'essentiel, au génie de Bernanons, contient tout ce que le roman pouvait offrir et, par surcroît, sa réfraction dans le cinema” [The aesthetic pleasure that one can experience from Bresson’s film, if its merit is clearly due fundamentally to Bernanos’ brilliance, includes all that the novel could offer, and therefore also its refraction in the cinema] (Bazin 1985, 127). Bazin then continues: “il ne s'agit plus ici de traduire, si fidèlement, si intelligentement que ce soit, moins encore de s'inspirer librement, avec un amoureux respect, en vue d'un film qui double l'oeuvre, mais de construire sur le roman, par le cinéma, une oeuvre à l'état second” [for the same reasons for which a translation word-for-word is worthless, and that a too-free one seems reprehensible to us, a good adaptation must succeed in restoring the essence of the word and of the spirit] (124). Thus, for Bazin, who conjures up the moments of raw violence in Bernanos’ novel while remembering how much violence depicted in film is banalized, the authentic equivalent of Bernanos’ hyperbole was elision and litotes from the découpage of Robert Bresson (135). Bazin outlines the various modes utilized by the two media to represent actions and descriptions of things, places and characters. However, he insists upon the fact that the sentiments aroused in

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reader and spectator are similar, even though arrived at differently (e.g. the description of violence in Bernanos and the elision of the same moments in Bresson). Bazin’s reflections on the Bernanos-Bresson pair remain fundamental for tackling the question of adaptation. Jacques Rancière, in one of his recent contributions, precisely with regard to the BernanosBressonin pair, La Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette (Bernanos) and Mouchette (Bresson), maintains that in the text-image bond, a continual and dynamic passage materializes, since literature cannot unequivocally define itself as “l’art du langage qu’il faudrait mettre en images plastiques et en mouvement cinématographique” [the art of language that must then be placed in malleable images and in cinematographic motion] (Rancière 2003, 128). Rancière holds that literature requires the contrary— something very clear in Ammaniti—a certain “imagéité” and a decided “mobilité”. According to Rancière’s meaning, literature produces a certain “cinematographism”, which can be defined by three main characteristics: the privilege of the silent word (Rancière 1999); the power of the word granted by the silent presence of the object (whether the object is one of the cornerstones of the narration or whether it is an insignificant accessory); the equality of each thing represented (a face, a gesture, an object, a noise, everything is rendered with the same material); and finally, the sequential treatment of time. In particular, the idea that time in Bernanos, according to Rancière, functions in a sequential manner—as mentioned above—i.e. dissected into fragments of the present which could be equated with some of the sequences (Rancière 1999, 129), is an even more important key when thinking of Ammaniti’s novel. The fact that Ammaniti executes a literary text and not a film, liberates him from the concerns and constraints of the cinematic medium, which for example would hinder the expression of certain zones of “enunciative indetermination”, zones which by contrast in literature have a fertile history: one thinks of the cases in which the text was given an impersonal dimension by presenting it as a “manuscript found in the cupboard under the stairs ”, and then “related by a renowned author” or of the enunciative modes the technique of “free indirect discourse” offers, to which I will shortly turn. For example Gerard Genette writes that “à la différence du cinéaste, le romancier n’est pas obligé de mettre sa caméra quelque part: il n’a pas de caméra [unlike the cinematographer, the novelist is not obliged to plonk his camera down somewhere: as for the camera, he simply doesn’t have one] and adds in a note: “il est vrai qu’il peu aujourd’hui, effet rebound, d’un médium sur l’autre, feindre d’en avoir une” [It is true however that today the writer can, as a result of the rebound effect of one

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medium upon another, pretend to have one] (Genette 1983, 49).14 This seems to me to be precisely the case with Ammaniti. In light of these observations it does not seem sufficient to me to speak of a “trans-media” manipulation, an adaptation, in the passage from novel to film, but rather of another form already in existence inside the text, in its totality of inter-media relations. Book and “film”, at least an idea of the film, literary text and filmic text co-exist in a continual interaction in the novel Io non ho paura. The constant exchange between book and film, apart from the chronological production of the two texts, is present in the novel in which the literary and cinematic forms continue to react with each other, creating specific meanings and hybrid forms.15 Ammaniti, a clear representative of his time, participates in the dismantling of obsolete definitions, such as those cited at the beginning of this article which so amused Jean-Luc Nancy. In conclusion, between book and film, there is established not a transposition from one system of signs to another, but instead a reciprocal crossing. The novel is permeated by cinematic images in a general sense; and the film, the cinematic image in the true sense, is suffused with literary strategies, as we shall see.

A Question of Perspectives: From the Novel to the Film Forse un giorno Pin troverà un amico, un vero amico, che capisca e che si possa capire, e allora a quello, solo a quello, mostrerà il posto delle tane dei ragni. È una scorciatoia sassosa che scende al torrente tra le due pareti di terra e erba. Lì, tra l’erba, i ragni fanno delle tane, dei tunnel tappezzati d’un cemento d’erba secca ; ma la cosa meravigliosa è che le tane hanno una porticina, pure di quella poltiglia secca d’erba, una porticina tonda che si può aprire e chiudere... —Italo Calvino, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno Perhaps one day Pin will find a friend, a true friend, that will understand and can be understood, and then to him, only to him, will he show the place of the spiders’ dens. It’s a stony shortcut that descends to the stream 14

See also Costa 2000, 169—184. Antonio Costa has underscored, above all, the composite dimension of Salvatores’ film, as well as of Ammaniti’s text, in a reading titled “L’immagine migrante: da Stand by Me a Io non ho paura” [the migratory image, from “Stand by Me” to “Io non ho paura”] and presented at the conference “La Fiaba e altri frammenti di narrativa popolare” [fairy tale and other fragments f popular narrative] (Università degli Studi di Padova, 1 April 2004), thus adeptly unraveling many of the works’ particularly intermedial entanglements and their rich intertextual allusions. 15

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between two walls of earth and grass. There, among the grass, the spiders make some of their nests, some tunnels paved with a mortar of dried grass; but the marvelous part is that the dens have a little door, it too of that dried grass pulp, a little round door that you can open and close. —Italo Calvino, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests

A quick exploration of the novel’s narrative structure will help complete this journey between the visual flashes of the novel and the literary heritage of the film. Michele Amitrano, the nine-year-old protagonist, has a secret: he has found a child in a “hole”. His childish imagination must help him reckon with this secret. The story folds back into itself on two levels: one that is directly recounted in the novel, through Michele’s eyes. The other level is that of the reader, who, not being nine years old, knows how to reconstruct the story on his own out of the fragments of the micro-story of Acqua Traverse, a poor hamlet lost among the fields of grain. Essentially the story is one of sudden change, a minor history of the Italy of the late 1970s, as if the years of terrorism, the mafia, the kidnappings, and the problem of the South had faded in the sun and sweltering heat of the summer of 1978, and had been filtered through the bold and scarcely credible adventures of Monicelli’s characters in I Soliti ignoti, and therefore through the picturesque spirit of Italian comedy. The novel is narrated in the first person, with two interventions by an adult Michele,16 which, rather than attest to the authenticity of the narrator Michele’s viewpoint, resemble instead the Hitchcock’s mocking cameos in his films. The events come into focus via Michele’s perspective, ingenuous and fantastic, which becomes for the reader an infantile alter ego through which to observe.17 In an echo of the Bildungsroman (Sabbatini 2002) Michele learns at his own cost in his baptism of fire that appearances should not be trusted. Throughout the story, orders and lessons are given to the child. From his father: “Piantala con questi mostri, Michele. I mostri non esistono. […] Devi avere paura degli uomini non dei mostri” [Drop it about these monsters, Michele. Monsters don’t exist. (…) You should be afraid of people, not monsters]; from his mother: “Quando sarai grande devi andare 16

“A distanza di ventidue anni non ho ancora capito come faceva a sopportarci” [after twenty-two years I still have not understood how he managed to stand it] (Ammaniti 2001 23); and “Circa dieci anni dopo mi è successo di andare a sciare al Gran Sasso” [about ten years later I happened to go skiing at Gran Sasso] (28). 17 On the questions of enunciation in this novel by Ammaniti see Bonsaver 2005, 53—73.

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via da qua, e non tornarci mai più” [When you’re grown up, you should go away from here, and never come back again]; and also from Filippo, “Il mondo è un posto pieno di buchi, e dentro ci stanno i morti” [The world is a place full of holes, and in them are the dead].18 However, in each “lesson” he is given, growth is up to him, the abandonment of fear involves only him. Discovering the truth with his own eyes at the end of the journey is left up to him alone. Almost resembling a “cronaca neo-realista” [neo-realist account], 19 the novel presents a street urchin and his gang; a South afflicted by atavistic problems whose results are evident; human and even climatic bleakness, a truck-driver father, a plot device justifying his lengthy absences in the story’s economy and leaving Michele to grow up deprived of a paternal figure, as often happens to the children of neo-realism; a taciturn mother, coarse and beautiful, with an air of Magnani; and a series of details that link the story to a contemporary history and geography, neither timeless nor utopian. The focus of the narration in the character of nine-year-old Michele leaves no room for sweeping historical surveys: a child lives in the present, and thus lives History, he does not think, explain or theorize it. As in neo-realist cinema, but also as in neorealist literature, such as in Calvino’s Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno [the path to the spiders’ nests].20 History, though not the center of the narration, is present and directly influences events and people, permeating the tale. To these two genres, Bildungsroman and neorealist account, can be added the imprimatur of suspense. The workings of suspense furnish the principal explanation of what can be considered the novel’s “enunciative indetermination.” Suspense is, in fact, an effect that is generated by an externally directed narration, so that the reader knows more than the character does, thus creating tension and fear for his fate. Therefore we fear for Michele, even before we fear with Michele. The little boy is afraid 18

In order to convince Filippo to leave the hole, Michele must adopt his language. “Fuori c’è il paradiso. Io sono un angelo e tu sei morto, e devo portarti in paradiso” [outside there’s paradise. I am an angel and you are dead, and I have to take you to paradise] (Ammaniti 2001, 145). Michele will truly play this role of savior, since at the end of his “formazione” [education], he will be able to decide and act on his own. 19 See also Vitoux 2002. 20 The two novels seem to have much in common, from the spirit of the protagonist that also influences the style of the descriptions—for example those of the respective villages—to the love of the protagonist for his secret, to the strangeness of the hiding place, where the spiders weave their webs, and where the bound child is found. Both, moreover, are novels about the ancestral fear of a child who discovers that he cannot rely upon the adult world.

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of monsters and not of the monstrous reality which he does not yet apprehend; we readers instead ought to know this reality without fearing it21. The focusing, in other words, the expansion of our knowledge in regards to what the characters know, is restricted in the text to Michele. Therefore, this is an internal focus. True, we readers know only what the character knows, however, since he is only nine, we understand more readily than he does, even if we only “see” though his eyes. Connected to this type of focus is another effect the novel generates, that of surprise, as in detective novels which are likewise constructed so that the reader only gradually grasps the facts as the case unfolds. Thus the disclosure of the mystery is delayed, creating surprise: in effect, even we spectators do not begin to know who is going to kill Filippo and, much to Michele’s and to our surprise, his father is the one who enters the hiding place bearing arms. A second observation on the novel’s enunciative levels reinforces this enunciative indetermination, whose cinematic correlative we shall examine as our final stop. The novel is rich in ekphrasis: detailed descriptions of objects, people and places. In a literary text, descriptions usually produce a temporary halt in the narration and serve as a zero degree for the focus. The instances of ekphrasis, which should be the author’s voice, beyond the world of a character, in the case of Io non ho paura are always clearly delineated by Michele’s level of language and style,22 imbued with his viewpoint and imagination, with his way of sensing and seeing, thus revealing his preoccupations and his way of being in the world. In fact the enunciation tends toward “free indirect discourse”. The use of free indirect discourse is tied to a linguistic and above all psychological choice, evident not only when the author directly relates the characters’ speech, but also when it is the author who describes, who speaks: “il libero indiretto […] è un vero e proprio discorso diretto senza le virgolette e quindi implica l’uso della lingua del personaggio” [free indirect speech (…) is true and proper direct discourse without quotation marks and therefore implies the use of the character’s language] (Pasolini 1972, 176).23 Each description is far from amplifying the “reality effect” 21

Additionally, the two interventions of the adult Michele, the two chronological displacements, which we indicated above, can comfort us, assuring us that at least Michele will not die in the course of the story. 22 Notwithstanding some expressions that would seem to come more from a lexicon more familiar to the author than to the character, such as when the hills show their “inappuntabile perfezione” [flawless perfection] (Ammaniti 2001, 20). 23 On the author’s attachment to his character, Pasolini distinguishes free indirect speech from the other classical category of narratology, the interior monologue. The interior monologue is realized when the author creates a character that is not

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(Barthes 1984), or from being ornamental. The ekphrasis of classical rhetoric is conceived to keep the reader continually anchored to the perception of the young protagonist’s reality. The novel therefore thrives on this typically literary ambiguity across levels of varying enunciation. Its cinematic realization poses the question of how to render all this without flattening out the ambiguity. Cinema cannot avoid the enunciative question of “who sees?”: either it is a character who sees (subjective image), or it is the “mega-narrator”, in a narration that is “self-made” (objective image). Nevertheless, one of the characteristics of modern cinema, (a category filled by Gilles Deleuze with a pantheon of works and auteurs of Italian post-neorealism Deleuze 1983 and 1985) is, on the contrary, the display of images that simultaneously evoke two regimes. Even if Salvatores’ film— no matter how pleasing and authorial it may be—cannot be counted in the tradition of Viaggio in Italia [voyage to Italy] and Prima della rivoluzione [before the revolution], still the consistency of some of its choices of découpage is recognizable, justifying its placement in the wake of works that construct a dynamic relationship among various levels of enunciation, as the novel had done. Nor do I intend to associate Salvatores’ film with the tradition of “cinema di poesia”, but rather to highlight the nodes of the film that emphasize the intermedia value that unites the novel and the film24. Pier Paolo Pasolini, in his essay “Il cinema di poesia” and subsequently Gilles Deleuze, speaks of a free indirect subject, the cinematic correlative of literary free indirect discourse, a question of style so dissimilar from himself, at least at the linguistic level. Thus this is more a question of style than of language. Deleuze treats this distinction in “La pensée et le cinéma” (Deleuze 1985), noting how much “the interior monologue” is of the order of the homogenous: where author, character and setting intermingle (here one thinks of the Ammaniti of Branchie); whereas “discorso indiretto libero” [free indirect speech] introduces difference, diversity, alterity. 24 Costa deftly summarizes Pasolini’s “cinema di poesia” in general, and not the particular use of the free indirect subjective framings, “lo scopo è dimostrare la possibilità dell’intrusione dell’io soggettivo e lirico dell’autore nel tessuto narrativo del film” [the goal is to demonstrate the possibility of the subjective and poetic presence of the author in the film storytelling form] (Costa 1998, 134— 135). In the case of the Pasolinian idea of “cinema di poesia” we wander too far from Salvatores’ film, in which the presence of the subjective and lyrical I of the author in the narrative fabric of the film becomes explicit in rare moments, almost always in quotations of some commonplaces of his work; one thinks, for example, of the afternoon in which the merchant arrives at the village’s piazza, and of the beautiful scene in which the representation of the community, the use of music and the movements of the camera recall Tourné, Mediterraneo and Sud.

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in cinema and of language in literature, according to Pasolini’s distinction (Deleuze 1983 and 1985). Deleuze explains that this deals with those significant moments in the film and more practically of those framings that produce a “totality of being”25 for the character. Onscreen a character acts, sees, watches and experiences the world from his own perspective. At the same time, the camera watches him and watches his world, from a perspective that “thinks” and that “reflects” that of the character. This splitting between the character’s vision and the vision of his world, channelled through the vision of what the camera forces us to see, this two-fold channel is precisely where the free indirect subject materializes. In Pasolini’s interpretation, the materialization of a certain mode of understanding the character’s reality encroaches on all of the shots, especially the objective ones, i.e. the ones in which the camera’s gaze does not correspond to the character’s gaze. Thus each component of the miseen-scene (the lighting, the set, the photography) and of the découpage (the shots, the camera movements, the editing) becomes filtered through the character’s subjectivity. Just as in literature the narrator penetrates the soul of his character, adopting his psychology, language, and way of speaking, so in this film the mode of viewing adopted is precisely Michele’s own, even when it is not he who sees—facilitated obviously by the Bressonstyle device of situating the camera at the child’s height, about 1.3 meters high, in many shots (Au Hazard Baltazar). Many shots and sequences in the film refer to a “subjective” idea of Michele, connotated by his way of sensing, of seeing, of being in the world; in reality, however, they are not truly and properly subjective. If one thinks of Michele’s breathless night run to save Filippo during which he hums the nursery rhyme Tassi barbassi to hearten himself: the extreme close-ups of an owl, a grass-snake, of a frog26 are the “technical” means, 25

Deleuze recalls here the concept of Mitry: “être-avec” the camera with the character and with his vision of the world, in a regime of semi-subjective images. It is not the gaze of the character, nor an external gaze at the character, it is a gaze that moves with that of the character (Mitry 1963, 61). The tracking of the camera in Salvatores’ film among the ears in the grain fields, or the descents into the dark hole where Filippo is located, are a clear illustration (Deleuze 1983, 106). 26 Costa has underlined (in “L’immagine migrante: da Stand by Me a Io non ho paura) the revival in this scene of the imagery of The Night of the Hunter (1955) by Charles Laughton, I would also add that of the imaginary flight of the man condemned to death in La Rivière du Hibou (1962) by Robert Enrico. In both cases we are in the presence of perception-limits experienced by the characters in situazioni-limite. See Deleuze 1985 and his concepts of “world motion”, and of “implied dream” that Deleuze proposes to realize, these subjective visions not

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analogous therefore to a free indirect subjectivity, that enable the character’s psychology to be shared (fear of the night, of the creatures of the night, fear of being pursued, discovered, spied on). Nonetheless they remain independent shots, created and transformed by the “consciousness of the camera” (Deleuze 1983, 108). This exaggeration of the terrified child’s sensory experience thus enables the spectator’s participation. The more marked the artifice of the camera, the more the spectator feels the character’s experience of the world; one could also think of the double zoom in on the detail of Filippo’s foot in the hole when Michael discovers him amid curiosity, loathing, and fear. This film, born in the text of the novel, surpasses the simple dichotomy between objective images and subjective images: we are dealing with a cinema that has acquired the taste of making the camera’s presence felt. Deleuze speaks of an overcoming of the objective and subjective poles of vision, in order to achieve a pure form that purports to be a vision nearly autonomous from the content. What we are seeing, then, is the result of the mutual relation between an image-perception that we attribute to Michele and to the “consciousness of the camera” that transforms it. Translated by Gabrielle Elissa Popoff

Works Cited Ammaniti, Niccolò and Daniele Brolli. 2004. Introduction to Fa un po’ male by Niccolò Ammaniti, Daniele Brolli and Davide Fabbri, p.n.n. Turin: Einaudi. Ammaniti, Niccolò. 2006. Come Dio comanda. Milan: Mondadori. —. 2001. Io non ho paura. Turin: Einaudi. —. 1999. Ti prendo e ti porto via. Milan: Mondadori. —. 1998. L’Ultimo capodanno. Milan: Mondadori. —. 1996. Fango. Milan: Mondadori. Barthes, Roland. 1984. L’effet de réel. In Le Bruissement de la langue. Essais critiques IV by Roland Barthes. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. 179— 187. Bazin, André. 1985. Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? Paris: Les éditions du Cerf. Bonsaver, Guido. 2005. Raccontare all’americana: “Io non ho paura” tra autodiegesi letteraria e soggettiva cinematografica. In Narrativa

controlled by the character, who in a certain sense, who in a certain sense is himself their victim.

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italiana recente/ Recent Italian Fiction, ed. Roberto Bertoni, 53—73. Turin-Dublin: Trauben. Brunetta, Gian Piero. 2004. Gli Intellettuali italiani e il cinema. Milan: Mondadori. Costa, Antonio. 2000. “Palomar:” intermédialité et archéologie de la vision. Cinémas 10, 2/3: 169—184. —. 1998. Immagine di un’immagine. Cinema e letteratura. Turin: UTET. Deleuze, Gilles. 1985. L’Image-temps. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. —. 1983. L’Image-mouvement. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Dusi, Nicola. 2003. Il Cinema come traduzione. Da un medium all’altro. Letteratura, cinema, pittura. Turin: UTET. Gaudreault, André, François Jost, Monica Normand and Viva Paci, ed. 2000. La Croisée des edias. Sociétés & Représentations 9. Genette, Gérard. 1987. Seuils. Paris: Éditions du Seuil —. 1983. Nouveau Discours du récit. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Mariniello, Silvestra, ed.. 2000. Cinéma et intermédialité. Cinémas 10, 2/3. Mitry, Jean. 1963. Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma. Paris: Édition Universitaires. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2002. Sans commune mesure. Paris: Centre PompidouLéo Scheer. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 1972. Empirismo eretico. Milan: Garzanti. Rancière, Jacques. 2003. Après la littérature . In Le Septième Art. Le cinéma parmi les arts, ed. Jacques Aumont, 126—142. Paris: Léo Scheer. —. 1999. La Parole muette. Paris: PUF. Sabbatini, Marco. 2002. Un monde plein de trous. Le Temps, March 16 www.letemps.ch/livres/Critique.asp?Objet=845. Vitoux, Frédéric. 2002. Petit plaisir à l’italienne: bijou fantaisie. Le Nouvel Observateur, February 14. www.nouvelobs.com/articles/p1945/a11302.html

CONTRIBUTORS

Marco Arnaudo has a PhD in Italian literature from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and a PhD in the Romance languages and literatures from Harvard University. At present he is teaching Italian literature in American and English popular culture at the University of Indiana, Bloomington. His book, Il trionfo di Vertunno (Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 2008), investigates the intersections between literature, art and optical illusions in 17th century Italy, paying particular attention to the works of Marino, Kircher, Tesauro and Bartoli. He has also written about the Baroque epics, the illustrators of Goldoni and Collodi, the influence of film on Italian literature and American and Italian comic books. Elena Benelli is Assistant Professor at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. She earned her Ph.D. in comparative literature at the University of Montreal, where she was the director of the Italian Language Program from 2002 to 2007, and taught Italian culture and literature. Her current research includes post-colonial writing in Italian, migrant literature, the cinema in Italy and the relationship between music and literature. She has published several articles on migrant writers in English and Italian in Italy and the States, as well as articles on contemporary Italian writers in Quebec. Stefania Benini has a PhD in Italian literature from Stanford University. She is currently the Assistant Professor of Italian literature and cinema in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania. Her main areas of research are Italian literature involving medievalism, from literature to cinema and theatre. Other topics of interest include Dante, Italian women’s poetry, cinema and the sacred and literary translation. She has published essays on Dante and Tommaso Landolfi. She is currently working on a volume about the “sacrificial” reading of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s works. She has edited an anthology on cyberpunk writers and translated the works of Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jack Kerouac into Italian. Riccardo Boglione has a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Montevideo where he teaches Italian literature at the local Società

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Dante Alighieri. His main areas of study are avant-garde movements and experimental literature. He has published articles on these subjects for various journals including Allegoria, Carte Italiane, Annali d'Italianistica, Forum Italicum, among others. Luca Caminati has a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is currently teaching Italian and film and media studies at Colgate University. His book, Orientalismo eretico: Pasolini e il cinema del Terzo Mondo (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2007), investigates the aesthetic and political issues concerning the visual representation of otherness in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films from India, Africa, and the Middle East. He is now working on the English translation of his book. He has also written about ethnographic and documentary filmmaking and contemporary Italian cinema. Luca Caminati’s new book will investigate the relationship between experimental modernist and realist techniques in relation to the formation of national and community identity. Raffaele Cavalluzzi holds a full professorship in Italian literature at the University of Bari. He has taught at the “G. D’Annunzio” University in Chieti-Pescara. In Bari, he was head of the Department of Italian Language Studies and Literature from 1995 to 2004. At present he leads the University Research Centre in theatre, the visual arts, music and cinema. His main subjects are Renaissance and Baroque literature, Manzoni, Leopardi, Fogazzaro and Pascoli, poetry and the 20th century novel. He collaborates with the reviews: “Italianistica”, “Critica letteraria”, “Testo”. Among his many publications are: Nel sistema della corte. Intellettuali potere e crisi italiana (Palermo, Palumbo, 1986), Il limite oscuro. Pasolini visionario, la poesia, il cinema (Fasano: Schena, 1994), Pirandello: la soglia del nulla (Bari: Dedalo, 2000), Cinema e letteratura (Bari: Graphis, 2002), Voci e forme di moderni (Bari: Laterza, 2006), Il sogno umanistico e la morte. Petrarca Sannazaro Tasso Bruno Marino (Pisa-Rome: Fabrizio Serra, 2007). Carlo Celli attended the University of Firenze and Bologna. He also received a B.A. from the University of Virginia as well as a Ph.D. from UCLA in 1993. He is the author of numerous publications on Italian literature and film including The Divine Comic: The Cinema of Roberto Benigni (2001) and Gillo Pontecorvo from Resistance to Terrorism (2005). He is currently an Associate Professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

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Antonio Costa, is Professor of History of Cinema in the Department of Design and Arts at the University IUAV, Venice. He is a member of the committee of History of Italian Cinema at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, in Rome. He collaborated and still collaborates for various Italian and International journals, among which Cinema & Cinema, Fotogenia, Bianco e Nero, Hors Cadre, Iris, Duel, CiNéMAS, Secuencias, Archivos de la Filmoteca, La rivista dei libri, L'indice, Studi novecenteschi. He is the author of various books. The most recent ones are: Il cinema e le arti visive. (Turin: Einaudi, 2002); I leoni di Schneider. Percorsi intertestuali nel cinema ritrovato. (Rome: Bulzoni, 2002); Marco Bellocchio. I pugni in tasca. (Turin: Lindau, 2005). Daniela De Pau has a Ph.D from the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign and is currently Assistant Teaching Professor at Drexel University, Philadelphia, where she teaches Italian (and European) literature and film and also coordinates the Italian program. Her main areas of research deal with Italian and European cinema, the relationship between literature, cinema and other arts, and the documentary tradition. She is the author of numerous publications on contemporary Italian literature and film. Simone Dubrovic is Assistant Professor of Italian at Kenyon College. He has published a book about the image of the "cave" in Medieval and Renaissance literary narrative, (Aprir Vidi uno Speco - Racconto e Immagini della Grotta nei Testi Letterari Italiani tra Tre e Cinquecento, Vecchiarelli 2007) as well as articles about the stylistic problems in Renaissance poetry and the figure of Alberto Savinio, writer and essayist. He has also edited the book, Radici Sporadiche - Letteratura, Viaggi,Migrazioni (Cosmo Iannone Editore, 2007) by Sante Matteo. Nicola Dusi (1966) has a PhD in semiotics from the University. of Bologna, and is a researcher in media semiotics at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy. He is currently on the staff of the movie magazine, Segnocinema,. He has edited issues of Versus (No.85, No.86 and No.87, December 2000), in collaboration with S. Nergaard, which deal with the subject of "inter-semiotic translation", as well as issue No.30 of Iris entitled Film Adaptation: Methodological Questions, Aesthetic Questions, in collaboration with M. Troehler and F. Vanoye. He is the author of Il cinema come traduzione. Da un medium all’altro: letteratura, cinema e pittura (Turin: UTET, 2003). He recently edited the volumes Remix-Remake and Pratiche di replicabilità (Rome: Meltemi, 2006) along

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with L. Spaziante. Together with G. Marrone and G. Lo Feudo, he edited Narrazione ed esperienza. Intorno a una semiotica della vita quotidiana. (Rome: Meltemi, 2007). Piero Garofalo is Associate Professor of Italian Studies and director of the Cinema Studies Program at the University of New Hampshire. He is co-author of Ciak… si parla italiano (2002) and also co-editor of Reviewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922-1943 (2002), as well as publishing numerous articles on modern Italian culture. Manuela Gieri spent many years at the University of Toronto, where she now holds the position of Professor in modern and contemporary Italian literature and theatre in the Department of Italian Studies. She is Professor of film and television studies at the University of Basilicata and has published extensively on Italian cinema, Pirandello, and contemporary Italian women’s writing. Among her publications are Contemporary Italian Filmmaking: Strategies of Subversion (1995), and Luigi Pirandello: Contemporary Perspectives (1999).Her main areas of interest are: film history, Italian cinema, Pirandello, visual and cultural semiotics such as issues of identity and representation, contemporary Italian women’s studies, modern and contemporary Italian literature and theatre. Flavia Laviosa is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Italian Studies at Wellesley College, Massachusetts. Her research interests are in Women’s Studies, Italian cinema, and Southern Italy. Her articles have appeared in Studies of European Cinema; California Italian Studies; Italica; Rivista di Studi Italiani; Kinema; American Journal of Italian Studies, and Italian Politics and Society. She has also contributed essays and chapters on Italian directors and representations of the South to the following edited anthologies: Italian Cinema-New Directions; Film Representations of Popular Culture; Teaching Italian Culture: Case Studies for an International Perspective; Nuove Definizioni del Sud; Incontri con il Cinema Italiano; and La Scuola Italiana di Middlebury (1996-2005) Passione Didattica Pratica. She is currently working on the edited book Visions of Struggle in Women’s Filmmaking in the Mediterranean. Palgrave-MacMillan (Forthcoming, 2009). Gaetana Marrone is Professor of Italian literature at Princeton University. Her recent publications include The Gaze and the Labyrinth: The Cinema of Liliana Cavani, a critical edition of Ugo Betti’s Delitto all’isola delle capre and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies, for

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which she served as general editor. She is currently working on a book about the filmmaker, Francesco Rosi. Valerie Mirshak received her B.A. from the Wake Forest University in 2000, and an M.A. in Italian studies from Middlebury College in 2001. In 2008, she earned a PhD in Italian language and literature from Johns Hopkins University with a dissertation entitled, As a Woman Writes: Alba de Céspedes's Screen Adaptation of Cesare Pavese's Tra donne sole”. Dr. Mirshak's main area of research lies in the intersection of gender studies, 20th century Italian literature and Italian cinema. She is currently a fellow lecturer of Italian at the Duke University. Millicent Marcus is Professor and holds the chair of the Department of Italian at Yale University. She is the author of An Allegory of Form: Literary Self-Consciousness in the 'Decameron, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation, After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz” as well as numerous articles on medieval literature, and contemporary film. Gloria Monti earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Radio-TVFilm at California State University, Fullerton, where she has been teaching critical studies courses including an introduction to film studies, American cinema, world cinema, Italian cinema, and Jean-Luc Godard. Previously, she taught film studies at Oberlin College, University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of California, Irvine, Hofstra University, and Yale University, where she also directed the Film Studies Program. Her research includes American and Italian cinema, feminist film theory and racial studies. She is currently working on an anthology that examines the “Southern Question” in Italian culture from a literary and filmic point of view. Viva Paci has a PhD in comparative literature (Literary and Film Studies) at the University of Montreal, where she is a member of the “Centre de Recherche Sur l'Intermédialité (CRI) and the “Groupe de Recherche Sur l'Avènement et la Formation du Spectacle Cinématographique et Scénique” (GRAFICS) and is post-doctoral fellow at McGill University. She was Visiting Professor at the University of Lausanne in 2008, and has taught at the University of Montreal, as well as at the University of Bologna, where she earned a master’s degree in film history. Many of her

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articles have been published in such journals as “Cinéma & Cie”, “Sociétés et Représentations”, “Cinémas”, “Comunicazioni Sociali, Intermédialités” and “Médiamorphoses” .Her book, Il Cinema di Chris Marker, was published in 2005 by Hybris, Bologna. As part of the "Esthétiques" collection in collaboration with André Habib, Chris Marker et l'imprimerie du regard was also published in 2008 by Harmattan, Paris. She is preparing the forthcoming Romanzi di deformazione, e altre piste di una generazione di narratori italiani, 1988-2008, (Firenze, Franco Cesati, 2009), along with Beniamino Mirisola and Ronald de Rooy. Jacqueline Reich is Associate Professor of Italian and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at Stony Brook University. She is the author of Beyond the Latin Lover: Marcello Mastroianni, Masculinity, and Italian Cinema (Indiana UP, 2004) and co-editor of Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema 1922-43 (Indiana UP). She is editor of the book series of the Indiana University Press's New Directions in National Cinemas, and the editor of the book review journal, “Men & Masculinities”. Carlo Testa (laurea, Milan 1978; Ph.D., Berkeley 1988) is currently Professor in the Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where he teaches Italian, French, and Comparative Literature. His first book, Desire and the Devil (1991), surveys the history of the pact with the devil in French literature and in the broader European context. In the field of literature he has also written about the novel of education, the literary tradition of the Homo Superfluus in the 19th and 20th centuries, and Utopian themes in French and European Romanticism. He also has interests in 19th century Italian prose and 20th century poetry. In Italian Cinema, he has edited a volume about the films of Francesco Rosi, as well as publishing two volumes about the re-creation of literature on the screen: Italian Cinema and Modern European Literatures and Masters of Two Arts. One of his current research projects is a book-length study of the representation of political violence and terrorism in Italian cinema since 1945. Georgina Torello is Associate Professor of Italian at the Universidad de la República UdelaR (Montevideo, Uruguay). She received her Ph.D. in 2005, from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research includes Italian silent cinema, gender studies and theatre. Articles of hers have appeared in Secuencias. Revista de Historia del Cine, Annali d'Italianistica, Teatro al Sur, among others. She also writes for several Uruguayan periodicals.

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Federica Villa is Associate Professor at DAMS, Torino, where she teaches film, theory and method of film analysis. In her research, she studies the forms and modes of writing for Italian cinema after the Second World War and, dedicates particular attention to the reconstruction of the work done by some authors and also to the analysis of some significant cases of screenplays. Among her publications are: Il narratore essenziale della commedia italiana degli anni Cinquanta (Pisa: ETS, 1999), Botteghe di scrittura per il cinema italiano (Venice: Marsilio, 2002) and Caro diario (Turin: Lindau, 2007).